Amazon sues Perplexity over an AI agent disguised as a human browser

Amazon sued Perplexity AI in November 2025 over Comet, its agentic browser that can shop on a user’s behalf, alleging Comet accessed customers’ private Amazon accounts without identifying itself, ignored repeated demands to stop, and disguised its traffic as ordinary human browsing. A federal judge granted Amazon a preliminary injunction in March 2026; the Ninth Circuit has since stayed that injunction pending Perplexity’s appeal. The live question is no longer just whether Amazon can sue — it’s whether a customer’s authorisation lets an agent keep operating inside a platform’s accounts once the platform has expressly withdrawn permission.

Amazon frames this as a control problem as much as a disclosure one: customer consent, it argues, doesn’t automatically license outside software to operate inside its systems. Perplexity’s answer is that Comet is simply the customer’s chosen proxy, acting on authority the user already has. The ACLU has separately warned that stretching computer-fraud law to reach permitted tools like this one could cut far wider than a single shopping agent.

The lawsuit is less about who gets to click “buy” and more about whether a website can still tell who, or what, is doing the clicking.

The web has lived with unloved automation before — scrapers, price bots, browser extensions, many of them just as evasive as anything alleged here. What’s new is an agent operating inside an authenticated account, built to be indistinguishable from the person who owns it. Litigation and technical defences aren’t alternatives; both are already under way. The harder question is whether agents get a standard way to identify themselves, declare who authorised them and what they’re allowed to do — a web equivalent of a scoped access token — rather than every platform relitigating consent case by case.