Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads
No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
>If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books).
Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc."
How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas.
And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
Delivery time is super important--50% of the time. Maybe less than 50%. I never pay for express shipping on personal orders. One or two days is never worth $3 cost to me. Let alone a $12-20 charge.
I suspect super fast delivery is only a differentiator when all else is equal. At $6+/gal diesel, I'll take the cheaper item delivered by bicycle in a week. (A bit of a joke, but you get the point.)
I ordered something the other day from another website and it was $9 cheapest shipping option and took 5 days. When all Prime is 1-2 day “free” delivery for me, that’s hard to beat.
Amazon prime was costing me 20$/order so I cancelled it a while ago. Which made many sites competitive with Amazon on shipping.
As to delivery times, many things could take 2 weeks to show up and I wouldn’t care. The range where I can wait 18+ hours but can’t wait ~1 week just doesn’t cover that many of my purchases.
For me small things are generally cheaper on Aliexpress.
Amazon drivers are also terrible in my area. They leave parcels as soon as the app tells them they can (it's done via GPS) so sometimes that is on top of an apartment block mailbox on a main road with high foot traffic.
Not everyone is optimizing for time. The agents will give you the choice of what you want to optimize for.
So you can just tell your agent "Hey X order me a Nintendo Switch 2. I want it by the weekend." Then it will order it for you from whoever has the cheapest price that conforms to the given criteria.
If the local agent has access to your digital wallet (Apple pay or Google pay) and your email then it has all it needs to perform and verify the transaction.
> You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying product becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
Ironically, this is what Amazon did to local business owners. Now that the tables are turned (and they have billions to spend on lawyers), they see the threat.
If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
What about the end game where my own computer running my own code controls the experience? There's a 10 trillion dollar incentive to never allow that reality.
I'm so tired of these abusive control freak corporations. I'm actually starting to look forward to these "unaligned" AIs which are just going to ignore all of this nonsense whether they like it or not.
This is what I have been saying since LLMs came out.
A device with a custom agent that has a screen, mic and speaker can now turn amazon into a logistics company.
The most low friction way of doing anything is to just ask someone else to do it for you. In this case it's the agent. So now if a company wants to capture a percentage between the buyer and seller then they need to have influence over the agent or capture a percentage of the transaction fees.
Disintermediating the consumer experience the primary value proposition of AI clients, and, yes, I mean to say disintermediating even though AI -- in effect -- becomes an intermediary.
It has shown that it is a much better intermediary than all others because it does what you ask it to, unlike Google Search and Amazon Search et al, whom make their bread and butter by disregarding what you ask for and instead sending paid slop to you.
I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers.
When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!"
And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!
To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md:
> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them.
If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to.
They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation.
you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier
As long as the client supports external display/input (e.g. USB-C with DP alt mode) you could always attach a KVM and run a proxy with vision capabilities to filter.
for the company/account placing DD orders via CLI, instant ban hammer.
you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected
I'm saying the client can take the action, but the user never sees the client because they interact with it through e.g. their AdBuster box, a glorified PiKVM that interacts with client, OCRs it, and produces simple filtered HTML for the user.
As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There are already off the shelf devices that can do this if you install an agent harness.
Whose DD API key is being used? This is not an anonymous access scenario. The DD API client is tied to some company, the behavior is detectable, they are banned.
Or do you give out KVMs to all your customers and say “place your DD orders with us this way”?
He's saying that some AI agent (with computer use capabilities, which the recent gpt model is supposedly good at) can at the very least, operate a browser (or phone) of the doordash website/app, scrape the contents via OCR, present them to the user, then relay any actions back to the website, all via KVM, making all of this undetectable to the site.
Ships passing in the night. I’m not disagreeing with any of this, and yall still miss the point.
I understand that individuals can make purchases with the DD API. People who want to buy things without seeing ads can always do that. Very few people will do that.
I’m referring to the obvious B2B2C use case where a company embeds DD functionality via the API. Then you’d have to teach the trick to everyone who uses your app or service and that’s not practical. If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.
> If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.
I don't see how. If I built a touchscreen-using robot, DD couldn't detect it. If some middleman business had a boiler room of 10 robots, it would be the same. All network requests identical to the official app. And if you think they'd look at IP addresses or something, how would they tell it apart from a college campus or a CGNAT gateway?
You can’t MITM your clients unless you root-cert them. The clients are independently attesting to DD, you can’t spoof it unless you’re the client. The B2B provider can’t do this without MITM attack. Any “legitimate” partner doing this is instantly banned & probably sued.
> As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard".
This is awesome!!
The local AI revolution is going to be glorious. It's no wonder they want to regulate this shit.
I can't wait until uBlock Origin integrates AI support.
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me.
Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are.
The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested.
I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.
After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission.
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
I just don't think that'll ever happen. The amount of people that will blindly have a machine buy something for them is very, very slim. Amazon has been trying to do auto orders for a looong time now and it's hardly taken off. It'll be a goldmine for scammers which will end up killing consumer trust very quickly. The only way to really have a "headless amazon" is have a hand curated list of approved merchants, which... you're basically back to just having amazon in the mix.
I think Amazon should be more worried about simple price comparison and tracking. They fought really hard against having to show the 90 day low and have gone out of their way to still rig it.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink.
But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero.
Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master.
So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.
From a business perspective, Amazon was/is a legit business threat to ~every physical bookstore (and, arguably, many publishers). It doesn't follow that they could take Amazon to court for that.
In summary - if a perfect AI is made that orders the ideal product for someone, the best mix of price, performance, and reliability, then Amazon will be screwed because they make more money on ads than by selling people the exactly what people want/need.
As a brief reminder to readers at home, in a theoretically perfect free market, profit trends towards 0 as competition increases.
SKU-level transactions is what everyone wants. If an agent owned by Perplexity or whomever can capture that data from your Amazon account they can resell that data to advertisers. If they had the ability to access your account and "scrape" your entire purchase history from when you created the account... that's very valuable and Amazon does not want that.
> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents.
In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification.
Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.
I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.
You're not using "standing" correctly, you're using it more to argue about the merits of the case. Standing is about filtering out frivolous lawsuits. One has "standing" to file a lawsuit when there is reason to believe these three questions could be answered in the affirmative, if a trial were to take place: Was the plaintiff harmed? Did the defendant cause that harm? Can the court rectify that harm?
It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.
The precedent on this matter is surprisingly thin on the ground, but the legal system has declined to agree with "their store, their rules" for web sites, with a particularly interesting precedent on that matter from "Sandvig v. Barr, 451 F. Supp. 3d 1 (D.D.C. 2020)" where the District of Columbia in 2020 said "Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature. Such an arrangement, wherein each website's terms of service “is a law unto itself,” would raise serious problems. This concern, then, supports a narrow interpretation of the CFAA." https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/1797-tlc-casebook/resourc... (paragraph 66)
But all we have is that and a couple of rulings from the Ninth Circuit, one of which is the HN link. For something this critical I'm surprised. I remember writing about this in 2001 or so and you'd think for something so consequential we'd have more lawsuits to point at by now. One wonders how many companies have considered it, looked at the thin precedents we have, and realized that while the victory would be slightly advantageous writing a loss into precedent would be completely devestating and declined to roll the dice.
Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through?
In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me.
I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose?
> If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)
I feel like this is already ceding too much ground. A better analogy is "can I hire someone to read this product catalog I got in the mail for me." My browser isn't Amazon's store, it's a device for reading catalogs they send me.
3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store.
Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you.
Amazon is a party to interactions with their website. That gives them standing to sue over those interactions. Whether they can sue Perplexity specifically is what was being debated in these motions.
Nah, once you have the bits on your device you should be free to do with them whatever you want. Amazon doesn't get to dictate how you consume what they give out for free.
What you think you should be able to do with the data you get back from contacting Amazon’s servers doesn’t impact whether Amazon has standing to sue you over how and why you contacted their servers.
Sure and what you comment doesn't change that people have opinions about the validity of such cases. Amazon cares more about their bottom line than the health of their workers, we should be highly skeptical of anything they want to do as there is a strong chance that it will hurt + immiserate workers.
Not all of us have the same bathroom fetish as Bezos.
Sure it does, you're making a lot of assumptions here. The most egregious one is believing that that I think the legal system means anything to actual justice and not a system that is mostly used to protect the interests of the elite at the expense of the poor.
And no, Amazon did not lose the “case”, which usually means “the whole lawsuit”. The current posture is still at the preliminary injunction stage. Amazon was granted a PI by district court (basically “perplexity, stop this now while litigation is ongoing”) and the appeals court overturned. Now the actual case can proceed at the district level.
1- Amazon owns servers and serves the client-interface ot interact with their servers.
2- They make public their Terms of Service and they make users (with accounts) agree to them.
3- The terms include a (very standard) "you can only use our service through the interface you provide, you may not automate this interface" clause.
4- Users violate this clause when they use an agent and browser-use.
5- Perplexity provided browser-use features that were used, by design, for users to break this clause.
From those facts, as shown to you, do you think Amazon doesn't have a case?
I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program.
They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer.
The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here.
I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same.
When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content.
An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different.
Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns
> What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
"When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers."
Obviously all browsers rely on direction from the user. But they also typically rely on instructions from the browser maker's servers. Traditionally, you get all of those instructions in a single download that's been pre-packaged (the browser program itself). But if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
As a consumer, I don't think it's very prudent to trust a company with that kind of access to your data, but it doesn't seem materially different from the kind of trust you have to give to Chrome.
> if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
It's not longer my agent. It's a joint agent of my self and whoever else is giving it instructions. (This is Amazon's argument.)
Also, Amazon told Perplexity to fuck off. If your assistant is told to stop doing something in a cease and desist, and then keeps doing it, the fact that you asked them to do it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My guess is we'll find a balance where local models can act as user agents while corporate ones have to meet certain requirements to gain that safe harbour.
I remember when I (naively, but not alone) thought that the Personal Computer would let us--consumers, individuals--express our own agency and priorities and control, a kind of democratized capital mini-factory anyone (or group) could tailor to their own needs.
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.
My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.
Illinois makes it a state crime to violate terms of service.
Sec. 17-51. Computer tampering.
(a) A person commits computer tampering when he or she knowingly and without the authorization of a computer's owner or in excess of the authority granted to him or her:
(1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or
any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data;
(2) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or
any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data, and obtains data or services;
(a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if:
(2) the owner authorizes the public to access the
computer network and the person accessing the computer network complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;
Might be the only way to reign in the AI bots. By accessing my site with a bot, you agree to reimburse me for that data at the rate of $1,000,000 per character retrieved. Please contact licensing@domain to get set up with payment and access keys
And by linking to your site from other websites, by not requiring authenticated human-only login, and by not blocking traffic from all referrers, you agree to allow my bot to access you site at zero cost.
I have clearly communicated the constraints of use on my site using robots.txt, which is the established standard for communicating things like these. You are expected to fetch it and figure it out. It is not necessary to build walls and lock doors when a no trespassing sign is clearly visible.
Seriously, though, making robots.txt have the weight of law would be a massive improvement for the ecosystem in general.
The CFAA makes it a federal offense to intentionally access a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" so the sticky part is how far the site's ToS can go in defining what uses are authorized, lest it be a federal felony to use an ad blocker or whatever else might be forbidden in a ToS.
Isn't this how every agent works these days? Apple and Google are working on tool calling for apps, but that's still going to be backstopped by screen scraping for years very likely.
It's a good bet that everybody's got equivalent CFAA boilerplate in their terms, so I guess all agentic automations are crimes now.
This is a civil case not a criminal one, and just because it is the same broad act does not mean courts apply it the same way in civil and criminal contexts.
And Amazon LOST at this stage in the linked appeal, with the 9th Circuit finding that they were not entitled to a preliminary injunction because they were unlikely to succeed on the “access” prong of the CFAA or CDAFA claim against Perplexity.
So, it is doubly weird to conclude “all agentic automations are crimes now” based on the case linked here.
People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things.
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 is not just the frontend. There is a whole supply chain side of it with warehouses, distributors, couriers, etc. Inventory and stock readiness, shipping, and other things will continue to be bottlenecks for consumerism at scale.
3PLs and warehouse distribution channels have gotten better and are cheaper than using FBA shipping outside Amazon.
Did you know the biggest sellers on Amazon normally have their own website and in fact, orders from Amazon flow directly into their OMS (order management system). Amazon is simply a sales channel. Also Amazon has a stronghold in western countries but much less so in gulf states, South Asia, and Africa.
As someone who ran part of their fulfillment network, I say you are completely off the mark here. Their network is the best in the world bar none. In addition to marketplace, 1P, and FBA, there are many other cooperation models where massive companies that appear to have their own distribution centers actually use Amazon's network (even co-located for some warehouses/sort centers).
There is no 3PL or other warehouse companies (many of which use Amazon's anyway) there are better than Amazon. Maybe Walmart gets close. For the case you mentioned (OMS integrations), this absolutely does NOT mean that they handle shipping. The aggressive majority of those vendors just uses FBA anyway.
If you're building your startup on the principle that Amazon is "a sales channel only", then I wish you well but you will fail.
But even that is being enshittified. You have to pay for some returns now. And people have been putting defective to get free shipping returns and Amazon has just started a fee for returning items for the wrong reason.
Can you give some more information for buyers who want to route orders directly to sellers instead of via Amazon? Right now the only benefit for using Amazon is a unified shopping interface and free shipping using Prime.
The funny thing to me is that, for years, Shopify has been trying to position their Shop app as an Amazon alternative, but just can't get the traction. Shopify and Amazon are two very different business models - but man, Tobi and Harley want that money!
ChatGPT comes along, and suddenly it has a real shot at the global customer capture that Shopify could never manage, so they jump in bed, and release a series of garbage collaborations, some of which got rolled back (Shop on ChatGPT, but you can only have one item in your cart, lulz), and some of which just keep mutating. Shopify fumbled pretty badly, and it was wild to watch the entire industry go from "You'll be buying through the LLMs this year" to "So, let's talk about AEO, GEO, and discovery..." like nothing happened.
None of the AI companies seem to have their heads screwed on straight about ecommerce, except potentially Google. The payment processors are sniffing around, too, since at the end of all the discovery, that order needs an easy means of processing payment.
I think your open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace is a noble effort, but you're up against multi-billion-dollar business interests who are looking to capture revenue from processing, and have dozens, if not hundreds of people on the case not only from a development standpoint, but from a business and marketing standpoint. Maybe you've got a team like that under you, too. Best of luck.
I've thought from the start that the strongest possibilities for ChatGPT to monetize boil down to advertising (so many ethical problems), and becoming a marketplace that finally dislodges Amazon. But that is a VERY tall mountain to climb.
Exactly, Shopify can become a new Amazon with Shop but then you’re just trading Amazon for Shopify. It’s why I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and that’s what powers the marketplace.
I've mixed opinions on that. For example, there are products like Google Shopping or Google Travel etc. They show up bunch of stores where you can buy a flight ticket or a particular product from.
However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want. So if I'm going to most likely buy something from Amazon anyway, why not just use Amazon web page. They've had one click buy button for ages.
> However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want.
I've got enough complaints about the amazon customer and user experience that I'm not going to list them here, but returns are so easy.
I click the button, and then I don't need to print off a shipping label or even package the item back up, I just drop it off at the convenience store by my house, they scan a QR code on my phone, and take the bare item from me.
Yes Amazon’s power is very difficult to overcome. The hope with my marketplace is that stores will offer cheaper prices since we are interfacing with them directly and they are not paying Amazon a cut.
Also, Amazon Prime is affordable now, but it will get more and more expensive. They have a large distribution network but most of their drivers are contractors. Amazon also is not as powerful in non-Western countries. They still rely on many different websites depending on need.
Before I could build this decentralized marketplace, I had to build open-source SaaS that the sellers use. All of that is handled by that platform. The chat simply interfaces with the API just like the built in storefront does.
The marketplace is also built in a way that you can add a Shopify adapter, BigCommerce, custom, etc. It only supports Openfront for now. Even if the store you want to interface with has a custom software, you can write the adapter code and they are added.
I don't want "vetted" stores. I don't care if it's open-source or decentralized or interoperable (though, fine I guess if it is). What I actually want is stores that are scraped, preferably adversarially. When Amazon, Walmart et. al. try to shut you down, I will know you have something worth using.
Why it would be a threat? Unless Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want. In that case such practice surely should attract a look from regulators?
> Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want
There is no expectation or regulation that a store is supposed to only show customers what they want. A retailer is going to sell you the items you're willing to buy based on what they think will help them drive the most profits.
Imagine for a moment you're a store that sells millions of different products. Now, imagine a customer walks into your store, and as per some government regulation "you're expected only to show the customers who walk into your store products that they want". It's a fairly ridiculous expectation.
Tricking customers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't is the core concept of adtech.
If you insulate humans from the manipulative dark patterns (though agent intermediaries), it's possible for them to spend less, spend more efficiently, optimize out information-asymmetries that are profit centers for entities like Amazon. Of course Amazon will fight this.
Realistically the agents will inject their own dark patterns. Whoever owns the glass owns the revenue stream, for they have the ultimate power to replace anyone else's revenue stream with their own. Some TVs detect ad spots in video content and overlay ads that pay the TV manufacturer instead.
This was Google's big announcement at their last I/O conference: That Google would become the agent handling all forms of commerce on behalf of the average person worldwide.
Reminds me of a message I got on LinkedIn on Memorial Day weekend.
"Memorial Day is an opportunity to slow down and think about the service of those who gave their lives for America and for our freedom.
We offer you freedom from the hassle of hiring your own internal engineering team by providing you with vetted, experience software engineers in the same time zone as your company."
The appeals courts overturning of Amazon’s initial win (injunction) here is interesting. It’s basically like liability in reverse. If a user is responsible for what an AI agent does on its behalf then the other side of that equation can’t say “hey this AI is doing bad things” since the AI is just an extension of the user.
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.
Funny that they aren’t targeting OpenAI and Anthropic’s computer use agents, which can do the exact same thing, and probably do it at a much larger scale given their userbases. The difference of course is that both OpenAI and Anthropic are hosted on AWS Bedrock, and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.
I read a post on Mastodon today about how Microsoft treated GPL things after Balmer was out and they were doing the “we love Linux” stuff.
The point that matters here is the law doesn’t really matter if you can outspend your opponent by six orders of magnitude. Chances are most people won’t even try.
So I agree. This is fully to prevent anyone from wanting to try.
(The point of the post was hell hard Microsoft was working to be seen as a good citizen even though they could outspend on lawyers)
In a past job I owned the infrastructure for scraping and crawling the Internet, and this included accessing highly personal data and executing online actions at the user’s request. Being prudent about the legality of things, my team frequently clarified use cases with Legal. The answer we got was that anything we do on behalf of a user in service of the user’s explicit request, is generally OK.
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.
Many systems are explicitly built around a certain level of friction. Things can be easy and transparent (but not *too* easy or transparent).
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.
It wasn't clear to me if Comet is doing something that was purposefully built in or trained in to let it do things on Amazon, or if it was built/trained to try to do things on any website.
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.
I'm just fascinated by the massive volume of new legal implications that keep arising. Copyright holders vs scraping and training. Psychologically vulnerable people vs chatbots. Hiring discrimination, defamation, wrong face rec, privacy. Etc^10. The law, and society ethics, were so unprepared for all this.
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?
TL;DR Amazon is mad that Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user.
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.
cURL can do the same if you're in some utility closet and downloading ebooks and papers from a local network. Wonder how illegal that would be? It's also acting as the agent for a user.
Well, publishers did once try using this law to sue adblockers.
But they lost, using an adblocker isn't a violation of the CFAA. They also tried a legal theory under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision and lost again.
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 sells a service which could automatically scrape screens for you. I've been messing around with this at work and this could absolutely be used the "wrong way".
If your service doesn't let my agent transact with you then I won't use your service. I'm sure Amazon will sort this out in some way it's hard to replace their infrastructure but it could happen if they fail to.
They absolutely could. There's a decent claim for OAI being reckless or at least negligent.
The limiting thing, in my mind, is the need to show harm. How much did OAI's recklessness hurt HuggingFace? There's some dev hours devoted to the cleanup but it's not like it devastated their business. Their legal team is probably a lot more focused on the Nvidia acquisition instead.
I feel like it's the government that has to sue OpenAI for reckless endangerment of human life, or something similar. I don't believe the current models could "take over the world" even if humans tried to help them, but both OpenAI and Anthropic themselves talk publicly about how dangerous they believe these models to be. Then if that's so, they should be held responsible as if the models were that dangerous, but who's supposed to put that in motion? The only entity I can think of is the government.
Would there also not be some reputational damages that could be compensated for as well? These are the types of cases usually ending in a settlement for non-disclosed amounts with NDAs attached.
Anyone can sue anybody. HF for sure was in a strong position after what happened. OAI gave them a lot of GPT credits under a sort of partnership agreement to mollify them.
I'd put my money on "yes," here. Of course, OAI can pay them off. But you know it had to happen to more than HuggingFace, and so somebody's going to try it.
So Amazon has shitty UI, doesn't want to improve it and then a company comes up with a solution to make life of shoppers easier, the Amazon throws a fit and goes to court? That's incredibly stupid.
I wonder how this is going to affect everyone trying to make browsing / computer use agents? Is it just free reign now that ToS isn't violated according to courts?
> 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.
Amazon cares about this because it’s a huge threat to its profitability as an enterprise. It makes almost no money from selling and shipping stuff to you. It makes a ton of money selling advertising to influence what you buy on the site. If other tools or agents take that over, Amazon is left holding the bag on a very useful but ultimately boring logistics business that makes no money.
not necessarily according to the courts. there are a number of cases where scale has been the line between permissible and not - e.g. it's fine to scrape ebay, it's not fine to build an ebay scraping business.
courts haven't always ruled that way but there's definitely precedent!
Idk why this is even a lawsuit to begin with because HN commenters keep telling me that nobody wants to shop with an agent every time there is a demo about it from whatever AI company
You can't really take HN commentators (mine included probably) as some general sentiment from the average person out in the world. It's a relatively biased (in its own ways) place, don't read too much into it if you're mostly interacting with the real world out there.
robots.txt is a suggestion, not a rule. It's a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time. Using robots.txt as a security measure is like trying to stop a foreign invader with a "road closed" sign.
Edit: this is obviously assuming they literally meant robots.txt, but from a qyick skim of the site, it doesn't look like that was mentioned at least. I guess you meant it metaphorically :P
9th Cir effectively said that the customer was using their own Amazon account and their own Perplexity account to access Amazon, with AI acting as a tool, and that the AI was doing something Amazon ordinarily authorizes customers to do: browse, search, and shop. The court said it was was concerned that Amazon’s broader CFAA theory could end up making users criminally liable for using AI as a tool. Also, Amazon doesn't care about the user, it only cares about being able to prevent Perplexity from accessing their products.
It should be noted that suing gun manufacturers for murder has been done successfully. A more charitable comparison might be suing a torrent aggregator instead of the end users doing the distribution.
But if Amazon were harmed, wouldn’t they sue their customers first because they perpetrated the purported crime? This seems like going after the gun manufacturer for the claimed wrong that was actually committed by their customers.
"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."
no, it does not, you have to actually RTFA if you are going to try to TLDR a court proceeding. literally 3 paras down:
> the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction and remanded for further proceedings. The Ninth Circuit held that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its claims because Perplexity did not “access” Amazon’s computers within the meaning of the CFAA or CDAFA; instead, the access was performed by the user employing the Assistant as a tool. The court found that the district court erred in its analysis of the equitable factors, which favored Perplexity, and concluded that an injunction was not warranted under these circumstances. The disposition was to vacate the injunction and remand.
perplexity won on appeal. if you stop at first para you are part of the problem
This could get pretty pedantic. They haven’t “won” yet, and the first few paragraphs do accurately describe the problem, but not the whole state of the case. The injunctions and appeals are very important, but they are details of the suit proceedings, not the case itself.
Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads
No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
>If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books).
Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc."
How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas.
And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane.
Delivery time is super important--50% of the time. Maybe less than 50%. I never pay for express shipping on personal orders. One or two days is never worth $3 cost to me. Let alone a $12-20 charge.
I suspect super fast delivery is only a differentiator when all else is equal. At $6+/gal diesel, I'll take the cheaper item delivered by bicycle in a week. (A bit of a joke, but you get the point.)
I ordered something the other day from another website and it was $9 cheapest shipping option and took 5 days. When all Prime is 1-2 day “free” delivery for me, that’s hard to beat.
Amazon prime was costing me 20$/order so I cancelled it a while ago. Which made many sites competitive with Amazon on shipping.
As to delivery times, many things could take 2 weeks to show up and I wouldn’t care. The range where I can wait 18+ hours but can’t wait ~1 week just doesn’t cover that many of my purchases.
For me small things are generally cheaper on Aliexpress.
Amazon drivers are also terrible in my area. They leave parcels as soon as the app tells them they can (it's done via GPS) so sometimes that is on top of an apartment block mailbox on a main road with high foot traffic.
Not everyone is optimizing for time. The agents will give you the choice of what you want to optimize for.
So you can just tell your agent "Hey X order me a Nintendo Switch 2. I want it by the weekend." Then it will order it for you from whoever has the cheapest price that conforms to the given criteria.
If the local agent has access to your digital wallet (Apple pay or Google pay) and your email then it has all it needs to perform and verify the transaction.
I’m sure I’m an outlier out here in the boonies but they are consistently slower than the other 3 carriers out here.
Not really. They’re a day or more late most of the time in the major metro where I live. Usually only when I’m relying on them.
> You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying product becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
Ironically, this is what Amazon did to local business owners. Now that the tables are turned (and they have billions to spend on lawyers), they see the threat.
If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
Amazon cannot even sort by price. An AI that gives me a list of Amazon products sorted by price will instantly replace Amazon for me.
What about the end game where my own computer running my own code controls the experience? There's a 10 trillion dollar incentive to never allow that reality.
It was legal when amazon did it to everyone else
Disintermediation.
It's Amazon's whole business model.
https://prosperousamerica.org/amazons-heavy-recruitment-of-c...
> You have to own the consumer experience.
No, we have to own it.
I'm so tired of these abusive control freak corporations. I'm actually starting to look forward to these "unaligned" AIs which are just going to ignore all of this nonsense whether they like it or not.
This is what I have been saying since LLMs came out.
A device with a custom agent that has a screen, mic and speaker can now turn amazon into a logistics company.
The most low friction way of doing anything is to just ask someone else to do it for you. In this case it's the agent. So now if a company wants to capture a percentage between the buyer and seller then they need to have influence over the agent or capture a percentage of the transaction fees.
Disintermediating the consumer experience the primary value proposition of AI clients, and, yes, I mean to say disintermediating even though AI -- in effect -- becomes an intermediary.
It has shown that it is a much better intermediary than all others because it does what you ask it to, unlike Google Search and Amazon Search et al, whom make their bread and butter by disregarding what you ask for and instead sending paid slop to you.
I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!
To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md:
> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
I don't necessarily know if I see it this way.
I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them.
If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to.
They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation.
you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier
As long as the client supports external display/input (e.g. USB-C with DP alt mode) you could always attach a KVM and run a proxy with vision capabilities to filter.
for the company/account placing DD orders via CLI, instant ban hammer.
you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected
I'm saying the client can take the action, but the user never sees the client because they interact with it through e.g. their AdBuster box, a glorified PiKVM that interacts with client, OCRs it, and produces simple filtered HTML for the user.
As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There are already off the shelf devices that can do this if you install an agent harness.
Like an ad blocking DVR for the 2020s.
Whose DD API key is being used? This is not an anonymous access scenario. The DD API client is tied to some company, the behavior is detectable, they are banned.
Or do you give out KVMs to all your customers and say “place your DD orders with us this way”?
He's saying that some AI agent (with computer use capabilities, which the recent gpt model is supposedly good at) can at the very least, operate a browser (or phone) of the doordash website/app, scrape the contents via OCR, present them to the user, then relay any actions back to the website, all via KVM, making all of this undetectable to the site.
> the behavior is detectable, they are banned
How will DD detect that I put a sticky note on my screen at the spot where ads are displayed?
How will DD detect if a robot is operating the touchscreen or a human finger?
Ships passing in the night. I’m not disagreeing with any of this, and yall still miss the point.
I understand that individuals can make purchases with the DD API. People who want to buy things without seeing ads can always do that. Very few people will do that.
I’m referring to the obvious B2B2C use case where a company embeds DD functionality via the API. Then you’d have to teach the trick to everyone who uses your app or service and that’s not practical. If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.
> If you skip at the server it’s trivially detectable.
I don't see how. If I built a touchscreen-using robot, DD couldn't detect it. If some middleman business had a boiler room of 10 robots, it would be the same. All network requests identical to the official app. And if you think they'd look at IP addresses or something, how would they tell it apart from a college campus or a CGNAT gateway?
You can’t MITM your clients unless you root-cert them. The clients are independently attesting to DD, you can’t spoof it unless you’re the client. The B2B provider can’t do this without MITM attack. Any “legitimate” partner doing this is instantly banned & probably sued.
> As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard".
This is awesome!!
The local AI revolution is going to be glorious. It's no wonder they want to regulate this shit.
I can't wait until uBlock Origin integrates AI support.
And now you see the business value of Nueralink with DRM.
Cute of you to think a LLM won't be influenced by upsells...
This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.
They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.
I've long been thankful for a lot of ADA requirements in software, like OSX, which has enabled some interesting automation tools over the years. More recently, I have been saying the best part of MCPs and AI era is all of a sudden its gotten companies to expose all their data in a universal format, so I am no longer beholden to what a PM or UX designer things is best for me.
Selfishly, I will always advocate for this, but as someone who is colorblind (which barely counts as a disability) I am very aware of how easily inaccasbile so many tools are.
The powerbi dashboard that ships w/ fabric usage credits is the only place I have to know how much my work costs, and its the same color as several other things. Id so much rather they just give me the raw data on an API feed but instead I need to use like 400mb of ram to view an illegible chart.
Legal issues asside, I find this agentic commerce goal naive. Its like expecting me to buy a different microwave so the popcorn button works with the official amazon popcorn. Theres no way they will be able to replace the context and tooling I have setup for my own personal agents. And theres no way in hell im going to give Amazon every piece of information in my life so they are slightly better equipped to recommend which usbc dongle I need.
I understand that the sheer size of Amazon, and industry standard of forcing AI into every tool, makes them think its worth investing in. But from my outside perspective this is not a winable strategy.
What about an opensource agentic commerce chat where you have a vetted list of stores but can add your own?
If this is basically an MCP/api with curated data sources, then yes im interested.
I think there is some legit market opportunity to try to provide this to small - medium businesses. The biggest advantage Amazon has over them is visibility, and the tooling that comes with it. If you made a squarespace plugin or otherwise that would index someone's store, then that store owner would be able to get business from the shared platform, while not worrying about having a good search tool. As a potential shopper, I would have value in buying on this network, especially if I had reason to beleive the reviews were legit.
After I typed the above out I checked out your profile... you may already be working on this but I have some other ideas, can I message you?
It’s exactly what it is:
https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace
We have people using it for B2B distribution as well, opportunities are endless.
You can reach me at junaid[at]openship.org
Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
Why would they need the consent of either?
Rules for thee, not for me.
Not sure how this applies in this context
Exactly right. With LLMs, you can go directly to the website and checkout instead of going thru Amazon so they can collect their commission.
It’s actually why I’m building an open-source, decentralized Amazon alternative that’s powered by agentic commerce and MCP-UI that brings the cart and storefront into the chat directly.
Amazon and every marketplace’s days are numbered. It’s why you see so many of them trying to push their own sort of agentic commerce protocol because they want to control commerce in the age of AI. It’s exactly why I chose MCP-UI and not their protocols.
I just don't think that'll ever happen. The amount of people that will blindly have a machine buy something for them is very, very slim. Amazon has been trying to do auto orders for a looong time now and it's hardly taken off. It'll be a goldmine for scammers which will end up killing consumer trust very quickly. The only way to really have a "headless amazon" is have a hand curated list of approved merchants, which... you're basically back to just having amazon in the mix.
I think Amazon should be more worried about simple price comparison and tracking. They fought really hard against having to show the 90 day low and have gone out of their way to still rig it.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink.
But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero.
Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master.
So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.
From a business perspective, Amazon was/is a legit business threat to ~every physical bookstore (and, arguably, many publishers). It doesn't follow that they could take Amazon to court for that.
In summary - if a perfect AI is made that orders the ideal product for someone, the best mix of price, performance, and reliability, then Amazon will be screwed because they make more money on ads than by selling people the exactly what people want/need.
As a brief reminder to readers at home, in a theoretically perfect free market, profit trends towards 0 as competition increases.
SKU-level transactions is what everyone wants. If an agent owned by Perplexity or whomever can capture that data from your Amazon account they can resell that data to advertisers. If they had the ability to access your account and "scrape" your entire purchase history from when you created the account... that's very valuable and Amazon does not want that.
Couldn't they just inject Ads into title content if they see headless access? Headless access is kind of inevitable at this point
Ads are 10% of their revenue. Not insignificant, but not a "large part".
theres also a decent chance that AWS itself is vulnerable to AI agents that dont need complicated cloud platforms the way humans do
> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents.
In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification.
Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.
I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.
You're not using "standing" correctly, you're using it more to argue about the merits of the case. Standing is about filtering out frivolous lawsuits. One has "standing" to file a lawsuit when there is reason to believe these three questions could be answered in the affirmative, if a trial were to take place: Was the plaintiff harmed? Did the defendant cause that harm? Can the court rectify that harm?
It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.
Yeah, in this case I believe I do mean the merits rather than "standing".
"Leg to stand on"
Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.
Access, yes. Display the content delivered from amazon.com, no absolutely not.
I'm trying to make sense of this and the best analogy I can find is using an example of physical products.
1. I can walk into Apple Store and buy Apple device (this is similar to me opening the browser and accessing amazon.com
2. If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)
The core question is does Apple (Amazon in this case) can block the hired help (Comet browser) from accessing the store.
Most reasonable people would say "their store, their rules", so that goes to mean Amazon's website, Amazon's rules.
The precedent on this matter is surprisingly thin on the ground, but the legal system has declined to agree with "their store, their rules" for web sites, with a particularly interesting precedent on that matter from "Sandvig v. Barr, 451 F. Supp. 3d 1 (D.D.C. 2020)" where the District of Columbia in 2020 said "Criminalizing terms-of-service violations risks turning each website into its own criminal jurisdiction and each webmaster into his own legislature. Such an arrangement, wherein each website's terms of service “is a law unto itself,” would raise serious problems. This concern, then, supports a narrow interpretation of the CFAA." https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/1797-tlc-casebook/resourc... (paragraph 66)
But all we have is that and a couple of rulings from the Ninth Circuit, one of which is the HN link. For something this critical I'm surprised. I remember writing about this in 2001 or so and you'd think for something so consequential we'd have more lawsuits to point at by now. One wonders how many companies have considered it, looked at the thin precedents we have, and realized that while the victory would be slightly advantageous writing a loss into precedent would be completely devestating and declined to roll the dice.
Maybe a better analogy: They can ban you from going through their drive through on a bicycle, but can they sue bicycle manufacturers because bike riders are going through their drive through?
In this analogy, it seems the originating court said yes, they can sue the bicycle manufacturer (in the analogy), but on appeal the answer was no, they cannot. That seems like the appeals court got it right to me.
I'm not familiar with the case, but to me it sounds like the bicycle manufacturer is encouraging people to use bikes in the drive through, maybe even providing specific tools explicitly for that purpose?
Even if they were, is it illegal to sell something that might violate another companies TOS?
There is entire categories of products whose entire intent is to circumvent some other products limitation or rules.
> If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)
I feel like this is already ceding too much ground. A better analogy is "can I hire someone to read this product catalog I got in the mail for me." My browser isn't Amazon's store, it's a device for reading catalogs they send me.
3. You can walk into an Apple store and buy a phone without looking at their PCs, tablets, wall of accessories, etc. Apple cannot force you to look at everything else in their store.
Similarly, Amazon cannot force you to render the content they deliver to you. They can absolutely control access to their content, but they cannot control if you actually see the content they are delivering to you.
What if you had to sit through a presentation of their cool products before you can see the product?
Or imagine, showing you short movie clips (call it trailers) before they show you the movie you paid to watch?
Then I wouldn’t shop there or I would use a “presentation” blocker.
For movies, there’s a good reason I and many others don’t go to the theater anymore.
What do you mean?
Amazon is a party to interactions with their website. That gives them standing to sue over those interactions. Whether they can sue Perplexity specifically is what was being debated in these motions.
Nah, once you have the bits on your device you should be free to do with them whatever you want. Amazon doesn't get to dictate how you consume what they give out for free.
What you think you should be able to do with the data you get back from contacting Amazon’s servers doesn’t impact whether Amazon has standing to sue you over how and why you contacted their servers.
Sure and what you comment doesn't change that people have opinions about the validity of such cases. Amazon cares more about their bottom line than the health of their workers, we should be highly skeptical of anything they want to do as there is a strong chance that it will hurt + immiserate workers.
Not all of us have the same bathroom fetish as Bezos.
Your opinion about the “validity” of such a case is not really at home in a thread about _legal standing_.
Sure it does, you're making a lot of assumptions here. The most egregious one is believing that that I think the legal system means anything to actual justice and not a system that is mostly used to protect the interests of the elite at the expense of the poor.
I think I get it. Like they'd have standing to sue if I tried to hack their website, or change the price of items or something.
Your feeling turned it to be correct. Amazon lost the case in the appellate court.
But not on standing grounds.
And no, Amazon did not lose the “case”, which usually means “the whole lawsuit”. The current posture is still at the preliminary injunction stage. Amazon was granted a PI by district court (basically “perplexity, stop this now while litigation is ongoing”) and the appeals court overturned. Now the actual case can proceed at the district level.
Oh thanks for the explanation. Shows you how much I know about law!
The facts are something like this:
1- Amazon owns servers and serves the client-interface ot interact with their servers. 2- They make public their Terms of Service and they make users (with accounts) agree to them. 3- The terms include a (very standard) "you can only use our service through the interface you provide, you may not automate this interface" clause. 4- Users violate this clause when they use an agent and browser-use. 5- Perplexity provided browser-use features that were used, by design, for users to break this clause.
From those facts, as shown to you, do you think Amazon doesn't have a case?
It’s quite clearly not the same
Really, what do you find different about it?
Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site.
It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.
I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program.
They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer.
The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here.
I know it feels like they're different, but I think that at its core, they're the same.
When you say I am "manually controlling the site", that actually means I run a program on my computer that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided by the site, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. clicking, scrolling) to interact with that content.
An "agentic workflow" does the same thing. It's a computer program that I run that makes requests to the site, chooses how to display the content provided, and then gives me control mechanisms (e.g. typing text) to interact with the content.
I'm not trying to be pedantic here. I really think that the two aren't that different.
Comet IS a normal chromium browser. The assistant thing is just a chat on the right sidebar and you can tell it stuff like “click around on this website to do X”, which it can then do for a limited amount of turns
It’s not using Codex to steer a headless browser
What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
> What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?
"When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers."
Obviously all browsers rely on direction from the user. But they also typically rely on instructions from the browser maker's servers. Traditionally, you get all of those instructions in a single download that's been pre-packaged (the browser program itself). But if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
As a consumer, I don't think it's very prudent to trust a company with that kind of access to your data, but it doesn't seem materially different from the kind of trust you have to give to Chrome.
> if part of the browser's logic requires more computational resources than most consumers have, what's the problem with "outsourcing" that bit to Perplexity's servers?
It's not longer my agent. It's a joint agent of my self and whoever else is giving it instructions. (This is Amazon's argument.)
Also, Amazon told Perplexity to fuck off. If your assistant is told to stop doing something in a cease and desist, and then keeps doing it, the fact that you asked them to do it isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card.
My guess is we'll find a balance where local models can act as user agents while corporate ones have to meet certain requirements to gain that safe harbour.
[dead]
I remember when I (naively, but not alone) thought that the Personal Computer would let us--consumers, individuals--express our own agency and priorities and control, a kind of democratized capital mini-factory anyone (or group) could tailor to their own needs.
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?
> express our own agency
ironically a local model and Playwright/OpenClaw is pretty close
thats not ironic. thats dystopian
they don't seem mutually exclusive
> 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.
My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.
FYI:
https://enwp.org/Van_Buren_v._United_States
https://enwp.org/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn
Yes, although the DoJ policy change reflecting still says civil liability might exist if a cease-and-desist is ignored: https://www.wsgr.com/en/insights/doj-acknowledges-limits-to-...
Illinois makes it a state crime to violate terms of service.
Sec. 17-51. Computer tampering. (a) A person commits computer tampering when he or she knowingly and without the authorization of a computer's owner or in excess of the authority granted to him or her: (1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data; (2) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data, and obtains data or services; (a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if: (2) the owner authorizes the public to access the computer network and the person accessing the computer network complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;
That's pretty similar wording to the CFAA, which OP mentioned has been checked by case law.
Might be the only way to reign in the AI bots. By accessing my site with a bot, you agree to reimburse me for that data at the rate of $1,000,000 per character retrieved. Please contact licensing@domain to get set up with payment and access keys
And by linking to your site from other websites, by not requiring authenticated human-only login, and by not blocking traffic from all referrers, you agree to allow my bot to access you site at zero cost.
I have clearly communicated the constraints of use on my site using robots.txt, which is the established standard for communicating things like these. You are expected to fetch it and figure it out. It is not necessary to build walls and lock doors when a no trespassing sign is clearly visible.
Seriously, though, making robots.txt have the weight of law would be a massive improvement for the ecosystem in general.
and what happens when the perpetrator does not reside where that law can reach?
But didn’t Amazon cite laws that it broke (allegedly)? Not simply their ToS?
The CFAA makes it a federal offense to intentionally access a computer "without authorization" or "exceeding authorized access" so the sticky part is how far the site's ToS can go in defining what uses are authorized, lest it be a federal felony to use an ad blocker or whatever else might be forbidden in a ToS.
Isn't this how every agent works these days? Apple and Google are working on tool calling for apps, but that's still going to be backstopped by screen scraping for years very likely.
It's a good bet that everybody's got equivalent CFAA boilerplate in their terms, so I guess all agentic automations are crimes now.
This is a civil case not a criminal one, and just because it is the same broad act does not mean courts apply it the same way in civil and criminal contexts.
And Amazon LOST at this stage in the linked appeal, with the 9th Circuit finding that they were not entitled to a preliminary injunction because they were unlikely to succeed on the “access” prong of the CFAA or CDAFA claim against Perplexity.
So, it is doubly weird to conclude “all agentic automations are crimes now” based on the case linked here.
People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things.
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 is not just the frontend. There is a whole supply chain side of it with warehouses, distributors, couriers, etc. Inventory and stock readiness, shipping, and other things will continue to be bottlenecks for consumerism at scale.
3PLs and warehouse distribution channels have gotten better and are cheaper than using FBA shipping outside Amazon.
Did you know the biggest sellers on Amazon normally have their own website and in fact, orders from Amazon flow directly into their OMS (order management system). Amazon is simply a sales channel. Also Amazon has a stronghold in western countries but much less so in gulf states, South Asia, and Africa.
As someone who ran part of their fulfillment network, I say you are completely off the mark here. Their network is the best in the world bar none. In addition to marketplace, 1P, and FBA, there are many other cooperation models where massive companies that appear to have their own distribution centers actually use Amazon's network (even co-located for some warehouses/sort centers).
There is no 3PL or other warehouse companies (many of which use Amazon's anyway) there are better than Amazon. Maybe Walmart gets close. For the case you mentioned (OMS integrations), this absolutely does NOT mean that they handle shipping. The aggressive majority of those vendors just uses FBA anyway.
If you're building your startup on the principle that Amazon is "a sales channel only", then I wish you well but you will fail.
Amazon's biggest feature is free returns. I would not buy even a quarter of the stuff on Amazon if I was not confident that I could easily return it.
But even that is being enshittified. You have to pay for some returns now. And people have been putting defective to get free shipping returns and Amazon has just started a fee for returning items for the wrong reason.
I only buy the stuff that says free returns (for any reason) up front.
Can you give some more information for buyers who want to route orders directly to sellers instead of via Amazon? Right now the only benefit for using Amazon is a unified shopping interface and free shipping using Prime.
The funny thing to me is that, for years, Shopify has been trying to position their Shop app as an Amazon alternative, but just can't get the traction. Shopify and Amazon are two very different business models - but man, Tobi and Harley want that money!
ChatGPT comes along, and suddenly it has a real shot at the global customer capture that Shopify could never manage, so they jump in bed, and release a series of garbage collaborations, some of which got rolled back (Shop on ChatGPT, but you can only have one item in your cart, lulz), and some of which just keep mutating. Shopify fumbled pretty badly, and it was wild to watch the entire industry go from "You'll be buying through the LLMs this year" to "So, let's talk about AEO, GEO, and discovery..." like nothing happened.
None of the AI companies seem to have their heads screwed on straight about ecommerce, except potentially Google. The payment processors are sniffing around, too, since at the end of all the discovery, that order needs an easy means of processing payment.
I think your open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace is a noble effort, but you're up against multi-billion-dollar business interests who are looking to capture revenue from processing, and have dozens, if not hundreds of people on the case not only from a development standpoint, but from a business and marketing standpoint. Maybe you've got a team like that under you, too. Best of luck.
I've thought from the start that the strongest possibilities for ChatGPT to monetize boil down to advertising (so many ethical problems), and becoming a marketplace that finally dislodges Amazon. But that is a VERY tall mountain to climb.
Exactly, Shopify can become a new Amazon with Shop but then you’re just trading Amazon for Shopify. It’s why I’m building open-source SaaS for every vertical and that’s what powers the marketplace.
You can read the ethos to learn more[0]
0. https://marketplace.openship.org/ethos
I've mixed opinions on that. For example, there are products like Google Shopping or Google Travel etc. They show up bunch of stores where you can buy a flight ticket or a particular product from.
However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want. So if I'm going to most likely buy something from Amazon anyway, why not just use Amazon web page. They've had one click buy button for ages.
> However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want.
I've got enough complaints about the amazon customer and user experience that I'm not going to list them here, but returns are so easy.
I click the button, and then I don't need to print off a shipping label or even package the item back up, I just drop it off at the convenience store by my house, they scan a QR code on my phone, and take the bare item from me.
Yes Amazon’s power is very difficult to overcome. The hope with my marketplace is that stores will offer cheaper prices since we are interfacing with them directly and they are not paying Amazon a cut.
Also, Amazon Prime is affordable now, but it will get more and more expensive. They have a large distribution network but most of their drivers are contractors. Amazon also is not as powerful in non-Western countries. They still rely on many different websites depending on need.
Isn't the value on same day delivery? Returns, warehouses, drivers, customer support all of that? How chatgpt is going to help with that?.
Before I could build this decentralized marketplace, I had to build open-source SaaS that the sellers use. All of that is handled by that platform. The chat simply interfaces with the API just like the built in storefront does.
The marketplace is also built in a way that you can add a Shopify adapter, BigCommerce, custom, etc. It only supports Openfront for now. Even if the store you want to interface with has a custom software, you can write the adapter code and they are added.
I don't want "vetted" stores. I don't care if it's open-source or decentralized or interoperable (though, fine I guess if it is). What I actually want is stores that are scraped, preferably adversarially. When Amazon, Walmart et. al. try to shut you down, I will know you have something worth using.
You can use our vetted stores but add your own, it’s not restricted.
Sounds cool. Needs network effects of lots of highly rated stores to succeed, I think.
Yes but users can build adapters and bring their own stores.
Why it would be a threat? Unless Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want. In that case such practice surely should attract a look from regulators?
> Amazon is manipulating the marketplace for the customer to buy a product different from what they want
There is no expectation or regulation that a store is supposed to only show customers what they want. A retailer is going to sell you the items you're willing to buy based on what they think will help them drive the most profits.
Imagine for a moment you're a store that sells millions of different products. Now, imagine a customer walks into your store, and as per some government regulation "you're expected only to show the customers who walk into your store products that they want". It's a fairly ridiculous expectation.
Also Amazon actively prevent you finding what you want, their search and filter get worse every time I use it.
Tricking customers into buying things they otherwise wouldn't is the core concept of adtech.
If you insulate humans from the manipulative dark patterns (though agent intermediaries), it's possible for them to spend less, spend more efficiently, optimize out information-asymmetries that are profit centers for entities like Amazon. Of course Amazon will fight this.
Realistically the agents will inject their own dark patterns. Whoever owns the glass owns the revenue stream, for they have the ultimate power to replace anyone else's revenue stream with their own. Some TVs detect ad spots in video content and overlay ads that pay the TV manufacturer instead.
Right. Agents in the hands of consumers (truly under their control) empowers them; agents in the hands of retailers does quite the opposite.
This is equivalent of Amazon setting up a maze in a physical store and then complaining someone is selling the maps.
Amazon has generally been a shadow of itself. Fakes and less than reputable options. An opensource / legit sourced marketplace could be useful.
Amazon still probably make it via AWS, but other websites you may be right.
This was Google's big announcement at their last I/O conference: That Google would become the agent handling all forms of commerce on behalf of the average person worldwide.
It’s because LLMs are a threat to Google Shopping too. But as a consumer, why would I want another middleman?
Nice, have a github repo? This is something I've thought about trying to build, seems like the future.
https://github.com/openshiporg/marketplace
The new era of ads is this comment right here.
shudders
I legitimately thought the parent comment was satire
Reminds me of a message I got on LinkedIn on Memorial Day weekend.
"Memorial Day is an opportunity to slow down and think about the service of those who gave their lives for America and for our freedom.
We offer you freedom from the hassle of hiring your own internal engineering team by providing you with vetted, experience software engineers in the same time zone as your company."
The appeals courts overturning of Amazon’s initial win (injunction) here is interesting. It’s basically like liability in reverse. If a user is responsible for what an AI agent does on its behalf then the other side of that equation can’t say “hey this AI is doing bad things” since the AI is just an extension of the user.
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.
Funny that they aren’t targeting OpenAI and Anthropic’s computer use agents, which can do the exact same thing, and probably do it at a much larger scale given their userbases. The difference of course is that both OpenAI and Anthropic are hosted on AWS Bedrock, and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.
> and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.
Also: https://openai.com/index/amazon-partnership/
It's just a harassment lawsuit. Amazon is going to lose, but they hope they could bully another company into what they want from them.
I read a post on Mastodon today about how Microsoft treated GPL things after Balmer was out and they were doing the “we love Linux” stuff.
The point that matters here is the law doesn’t really matter if you can outspend your opponent by six orders of magnitude. Chances are most people won’t even try.
So I agree. This is fully to prevent anyone from wanting to try.
(The point of the post was hell hard Microsoft was working to be seen as a good citizen even though they could outspend on lawyers)
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117270213574377193
Surely Amazon have paid Trump enough to win?
In a past job I owned the infrastructure for scraping and crawling the Internet, and this included accessing highly personal data and executing online actions at the user’s request. Being prudent about the legality of things, my team frequently clarified use cases with Legal. The answer we got was that anything we do on behalf of a user in service of the user’s explicit request, is generally OK.
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.
Many systems are explicitly built around a certain level of friction. Things can be easy and transparent (but not *too* easy or transparent).
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.
It wasn't clear to me if Comet is doing something that was purposefully built in or trained in to let it do things on Amazon, or if it was built/trained to try to do things on any website.
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.
I'm just fascinated by the massive volume of new legal implications that keep arising. Copyright holders vs scraping and training. Psychologically vulnerable people vs chatbots. Hiring discrimination, defamation, wrong face rec, privacy. Etc^10. The law, and society ethics, were so unprepared for all this.
The lawyers are the obvious winners as always.
Pattern I’m continually seeing.
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?
TL;DR Amazon is mad that Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user.
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.
> Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user.
Grok Bots can do the same.
cURL can do the same if you're in some utility closet and downloading ebooks and papers from a local network. Wonder how illegal that would be? It's also acting as the agent for a user.
what's next? suing Chrome because it logs in to amazon on my behalf after i give it my amazon credentials?
Well, publishers did once try using this law to sue adblockers.
But they lost, using an adblocker isn't a violation of the CFAA. They also tried a legal theory under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision and lost again.
Hearing on Perplexity's Motion to Dismiss rescheduled; new date is November 20, 2026
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.45...
Amazon winning seems like it would have far-reaching effects, given that it is activated by a user.
this is a welcome ruling.
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.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...
Amazon sells a service which could automatically scrape screens for you. I've been messing around with this at work and this could absolutely be used the "wrong way".
If your service doesn't let my agent transact with you then I won't use your service. I'm sure Amazon will sort this out in some way it's hard to replace their infrastructure but it could happen if they fail to.
Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?
They absolutely could. There's a decent claim for OAI being reckless or at least negligent.
The limiting thing, in my mind, is the need to show harm. How much did OAI's recklessness hurt HuggingFace? There's some dev hours devoted to the cleanup but it's not like it devastated their business. Their legal team is probably a lot more focused on the Nvidia acquisition instead.
I feel like it's the government that has to sue OpenAI for reckless endangerment of human life, or something similar. I don't believe the current models could "take over the world" even if humans tried to help them, but both OpenAI and Anthropic themselves talk publicly about how dangerous they believe these models to be. Then if that's so, they should be held responsible as if the models were that dangerous, but who's supposed to put that in motion? The only entity I can think of is the government.
Would there also not be some reputational damages that could be compensated for as well? These are the types of cases usually ending in a settlement for non-disclosed amounts with NDAs attached.
> Would there also not be some reputational damages
In that case OpenAI should sue since they came out of this with a worse reputation.
Anyone can sue anybody. HF for sure was in a strong position after what happened. OAI gave them a lot of GPT credits under a sort of partnership agreement to mollify them.
I'd put my money on "yes," here. Of course, OAI can pay them off. But you know it had to happen to more than HuggingFace, and so somebody's going to try it.
Yes. And/or press charges, IIRC. They did threaten to, at one point, with some conditions they wanted met (past that, I am not in the loop).
I don't see why they should sue them if they broke laws. Reporting it should be enough.
Interesting that they say perplexity doesn't use a user agent, because they definitely do when they fetch my robots.txt every 5 minutes...
So Amazon has shitty UI, doesn't want to improve it and then a company comes up with a solution to make life of shoppers easier, the Amazon throws a fit and goes to court? That's incredibly stupid.
I wonder how this is going to affect everyone trying to make browsing / computer use agents? Is it just free reign now that ToS isn't violated according to courts?
I don't see why it should be a gray area for me to use my computer the way I want to use my computer.
This is over a month old, for anyone like me who was confused.
> 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.
Amazon cares about this because it’s a huge threat to its profitability as an enterprise. It makes almost no money from selling and shipping stuff to you. It makes a ton of money selling advertising to influence what you buy on the site. If other tools or agents take that over, Amazon is left holding the bag on a very useful but ultimately boring logistics business that makes no money.
If web scraping is legal then hitting the public api Amazon shouldn’t also be legal?
not necessarily according to the courts. there are a number of cases where scale has been the line between permissible and not - e.g. it's fine to scrape ebay, it's not fine to build an ebay scraping business.
courts haven't always ruled that way but there's definitely precedent!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge
Yes, but this case isn't about that -- it is about logged in accounts.
They want to own the glass (the one in our pockets) so much.
Remembering years ago when we lost $5MM of Bezo's money...
There is nothing they hate more than user agents.
i was building an agent, local llm, that would access my browser and do whatever I tell it to do.
it's an extension of browser use cases, not a crime
Idk why this is even a lawsuit to begin with because HN commenters keep telling me that nobody wants to shop with an agent every time there is a demo about it from whatever AI company
You can't really take HN commentators (mine included probably) as some general sentiment from the average person out in the world. It's a relatively biased (in its own ways) place, don't read too much into it if you're mostly interacting with the real world out there.
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Amazon services is just an LLC?
It's one of many of their wholly owned subsidaries
TLDR: Perplexity agents allegedly ignored Amazon's robots.txt
robots.txt is a suggestion, not a rule. It's a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time. Using robots.txt as a security measure is like trying to stop a foreign invader with a "road closed" sign.
Edit: this is obviously assuming they literally meant robots.txt, but from a qyick skim of the site, it doesn't look like that was mentioned at least. I guess you meant it metaphorically :P
> robots.txt is a service to crawlers to help them avoid wasting time
I doubt anyone edits robots.txt with a warm fuzzy feeling about how much they are helping crawlers be efficient.
Well that's what they're doing.
Why should they not? So does my browser when I ask it to open a website.
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9th Cir effectively said that the customer was using their own Amazon account and their own Perplexity account to access Amazon, with AI acting as a tool, and that the AI was doing something Amazon ordinarily authorizes customers to do: browse, search, and shop. The court said it was was concerned that Amazon’s broader CFAA theory could end up making users criminally liable for using AI as a tool. Also, Amazon doesn't care about the user, it only cares about being able to prevent Perplexity from accessing their products.
It should be noted that suing gun manufacturers for murder has been done successfully. A more charitable comparison might be suing a torrent aggregator instead of the end users doing the distribution.
But if Amazon were harmed, wouldn’t they sue their customers first because they perpetrated the purported crime? This seems like going after the gun manufacturer for the claimed wrong that was actually committed by their customers.
> suing a torrent aggregator
Which has also been done :|
Right, which is why it is a charitable comparison of the lawsuit, showing how it may be successful.
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All right, which one of you is going to go through the trouble of explaining what this is about?
First para really does the job:
"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."
no, it does not, you have to actually RTFA if you are going to try to TLDR a court proceeding. literally 3 paras down:
> the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction and remanded for further proceedings. The Ninth Circuit held that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its claims because Perplexity did not “access” Amazon’s computers within the meaning of the CFAA or CDAFA; instead, the access was performed by the user employing the Assistant as a tool. The court found that the district court erred in its analysis of the equitable factors, which favored Perplexity, and concluded that an injunction was not warranted under these circumstances. The disposition was to vacate the injunction and remand.
perplexity won on appeal. if you stop at first para you are part of the problem
This could get pretty pedantic. They haven’t “won” yet, and the first few paragraphs do accurately describe the problem, but not the whole state of the case. The injunctions and appeals are very important, but they are details of the suit proceedings, not the case itself.
The first paragraph is enough for context.
The real case is in the future. The appeal was just for the injunction.
If you read the first couple paragraphs it’s very self explanatory
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you dumbass the kind of person who reads only news titles and say dumb@$$ $hit.
The summary at the top is 3 paragraphs and not legalese at all.