Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

TutleCpt

All right, which one of you is going to go through the trouble of explaining what this is about?

metayrnc

> 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.

algoth1

TLDR: Perplexity agents allegedly ignored Amazon's robots.txt

hobo_in_library

> 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.

Legend2440

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.

gz5

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.

Terr_

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?

prometheus1992

Piggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?

eigencoder

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.

cynicalsecurity

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.

mywittyname

Amazon winning seems like it would have far-reaching effects, given that it is activated by a user.

dzonga

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.

ada1981

Remembering years ago when we lost $5MM of Bezo's money...

nenadg

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

binlog

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.

dyauspitr

Amazon services is just an LLC?

mys1

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?

dcrazy

This is over a month old, for anyone like me who was confused.

at1as

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.

phoghed

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