Amazon v. Perplexity: who’s in control when an AI agent acts for you?
A U.S. Court of Appeals recently vacated an injunction against Perplexity AI in a lawsuit filed by Amazon regarding the use of AI agents to access user accounts. The court ruled that the user, not the AI, is the one accessing the servers, highlighting complex legal questions about agency and intermediary liability in the age of AI.
Why it matters
This ruling sets a significant legal precedent for how AI agents interact with third-party platforms and defines the boundaries of digital agency.
Artificial intelligence and digital commerce have locked horns in a case Amazon.com has filed against Perplexity AI. Amazon filed the suit in November challenging Perplexity’s Comet browser, especially its ‘Assistant’ artificial intelligence (AI) feature.
While a conventional web scraper passively harvests text to train a model, an agentic system like Assistant can take multiple actions on a user’s behalf, like a typical human agent: it can log into an account, compare products, fill a cart, enter credit card details, and complete a purchase all by itself.
Amazon’s grouse is that while the Assistant accesses customers’ password-protected accounts with the users’ permission, it lacks Amazon’s own authorisation.
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