Amazon and confusion regarding agentic AI shopping

Confusion After receiving a legal demand to prevent its Comet browser's AI assistant from making purchases on the site, AI recently accused Amazon of "bullying," describing the action as a "threat to user choice." The specifics: Amazon sent a "aggressive legal threat" asking that it stop Comet users from employing agents to purchase on its platform, according to Perplexity. Concerned about Perplexity's "significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience," Amazon wrote a blog post of its own. In recent months, Amazon has also disabled OpenAI, Google, and Meta's AI crawlers while creating its own purchasing tools, such as Rufus and "Buy For Me." Perplexity declared that it "will not be intimidated" and referred to Amazon as a "corporate bully" that prioritizes selling advertisements over user rights. AI agents and platforms seeking control over the experience (or developing their own internal agents that directly compete) are on a collision course. Platforms restricting access could seriously disrupt the already cumbersome agentic process since agents rely on the open web to finish jobs.