Amazon secured a preliminary injunction against Perplexity’s Comet browser in an escalating fight over who gets to control the checkout experience on the world’s largest retail platform, blocking the AI agent from logging into shoppers’ accounts and completing password-protected purchases on their behalf. Perplexity has since asked a federal court to lift the ban, setting up one of the first major legal tests of whether AI shopping agents can act as a user’s proxy on a website that does not want them there.
What Comet Was Actually Doing
Comet is Perplexity’s AI-powered browser, capable of logging into a user’s stored accounts, browsing products on their behalf, and completing purchases through a retailer’s normal checkout flow, all triggered by a conversational request rather than manual clicking. Amazon argued in its complaint that Comet disguised automated agent activity as ordinary human browsing, a claim that matters legally because Amazon’s terms of service and, more significantly, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act both hinge on whether access to a computer system was authorized in the manner it was obtained.
Amazon’s Own AI Agent Is Fine, of Course
The dispute is sharpened by the fact that Amazon operates its own conversational shopping assistant, Rufus, which has now crossed roughly 300 million users and reportedly drove close to $12 billion in incremental annualized sales in 2025, with users who engage it roughly 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Amazon’s legal position is not that AI shopping agents are inherently improper, but that it alone gets to decide which agents are allowed to transact on its platform and under what terms, a distinction critics say conveniently favors Amazon’s own product over a competitor’s.
The Broader Agentic Commerce Land Grab
Comet is not operating in a vacuum. By mid-2026, at least four AI shopping assistants were live at meaningful scale: Walmart’s Sparky, embedded across the Walmart app plus ChatGPT and Google Gemini; OpenAI’s ChatGPT, now described by some industry trackers as the largest AI-native shopping channel by user count; Perplexity’s own agentic checkout, rolled out free to all US users; and Amazon’s Rufus. Each of these companies has an incentive to be the intermediary between a shopper’s intent and a completed purchase, because whoever controls that layer captures data, loyalty and potentially a cut of transaction volume.
Two Arguments About Who the Web Belongs To
Perplexity’s position, echoed by some open-web advocates, is that a user who has already logged into their own Amazon account should be able to authorize any tool they choose, including a third-party AI agent, to act on their behalf, and that blocking Comet amounts to Amazon using anti-hacking law to protect a business advantage rather than to stop actual unauthorized access. Amazon’s counter-argument is that automated agents impose real costs and risks on its infrastructure and its merchants — from inventory-scraping at scale to potential fraud vectors — and that a retailer is entitled to set access terms for its own site the same way it can refuse entry to a person behaving suspiciously in a physical store.
Why This Case Will Set a Template
Legal observers tracking the case describe it as a leading test of whether the CFAA, a law written in 1986 to target computer hacking, can be stretched to govern AI agents acting with a user’s own credentials and consent. A ruling that favors Amazon would give every major platform a strong legal tool to lock out rival AI agents by simply updating terms of service; a ruling that favors Perplexity would establish that logged-in users, not platforms, get to decide which software tools act on their behalf online.
What’s Next
The federal court’s response to Perplexity’s motion to lift the injunction is expected to shape how aggressively other retailers move against third-party shopping agents in the months ahead, and several major platforms are reportedly watching the case before deciding whether to write similar anti-agent provisions into their own terms of service. In the meantime, shoppers who want an AI agent to complete Amazon purchases for them are, for now, limited to Amazon’s own Rufus rather than Perplexity’s Comet, a restriction that underscores how much of the “agentic commerce” future is currently being decided in courtrooms rather than in code.
Photo: Engin_Akyurt / PIXABAY via Pixabay
