Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

Nowadays it feels more like "Visitors shall think what our brain-stream tells you to think, or be guilty of contempt of business model."

Is there any important legal difference between what's happening here versus a bunch of friends running a "share and notice favorite deals" collective via plugin+server?

Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.

So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’re just trading one master for another.

It’s why I’m building an open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace. It’s powered by agentic commerce and we include a list of vetted stores but you can bring your own.

Amazon tried to go after the AI and its maker but seems the court is nudging Amazon to say if you have a problem with this then go after your customers as they’re the ones doing this.

And Amazon’s customers are only doing this because the shopping experience on the website is terrible and Amazon’s own AI is a hot mess.

As long as it’s not otherwise unlawful, of course, e.g. no bypassing security measures, which is generally verboten for users and agents alike. (Websites try to leverage this aspect by throwing up bot-specific security measures.) Caveats: this was an decade+ ago, our use-cases were different, and case law has changed since then. But simplistically, anything a human can legally do, software can also do for them.

This makes sense to me. In fact it is explicitly encoded in the language of the web: browsers are identified as “User Agents” after all.

We just happen to be in an era where our User Agents are now much more autonomous than before, and this threatens a lot of moats built around human attention.

Agentic AI collapses that in ways that threaten existing business models, especially in retail (but also credit card points, discount retailers, mail in rebates and sales, cheap flights, etc).

Either it'll be forbidden, or businesses will have to adapt in ways that may not be favorable to Amazon, etc.

From what the net tells me it is the latter. There is no special "work with Amazon" stuff.

If that's true I expect will lose when the actual trial takes place and when that is appealed. (The decision today is just about a preliminary injunction before they get to actually trying to decide the outcome of the case).

I expect the reasoning will be similar to that used in copyright cases when the question was if the user is the sole infringer or the tool maker can also be liable. There it came down to whether the tool has substantial non-infringing uses.

I'm sure Perplexity will have trouble showing that there are a large number of website owners that don't mind Comet helping people on those sites so unless something was specifically built into Comet for Amazon I expect that will be good enough.

The lawyers are the obvious winners as always.

User: I want to access what your business provides via AI.[1]

Business: I am not incentivized to do that. You should use our specific AI workflow and agents directly in our software.

User: That gives me a fraction of the value I get when AI has the full context for what I’m trying to do and talks to all the software and services I use.

I suspect this is an opportunity for previous also-ran companies to gain market share or new companies to break into markets.

[1] Usually something less stupid than AI buying something for someone, but to each their own.

In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers.

Very interesting point of view. I wonder if people feel the same when it's not browsing Amazon but hacking other companies? These agents don't do anything by themselves, so wouldn't the same be true when it comes to breaking into 3rd party computer infrastructure?

Amazon argues this is against the CFAA because they do not authorize such use. They sued and got a preliminary injection. Perplexity appealed and got the injunction thrown out.

The case hasn't actually been to trial on the merits yet and is still undecided.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.45...

most of these search engine like companies including metasearch etc benefit from scrapping data on the onset, but then want to bring up TOS when they get scrapped.

in the age of agents - if your agent does work on your behalf on a particular site that should be legal.

Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of [blah]. Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.

it's an extension of browser use cases, not a crime