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Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- hobo_in_library 19d ago> 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.
- TutleCpt 19d agoAll right, which one of you is going to go through the trouble of explaining what this is about?
- binarymax 19d agoIf you read the first couple paragraphs it’s very self explanatory
- dabeeeenster 19d agoThe summary at the top is 3 paragraphs and not legalese at all.
- hobo_in_library 19d agoFirst 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."
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- swyx 19d agono, 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
- Dylan16807 19d agoThe first paragraph is enough for context. The real case is in the future. The appeal was just for the injunction.
- willy_k 19d agoThis 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.
- deleted 19d ago[deleted]
- giancarlostoro 19d ago[dead]
- metayrnc 19d ago> 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.
- LPisGood 19d agoMy 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.
- dylan604 19d agoMight 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
- warkdarrior 19d agoAnd 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.
- Tuna-Fish 19d agoI 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.
- algoth1 19d agoTLDR: Perplexity agents allegedly ignored Amazon's robots.txt
- j4kp07 19d agoWhy should they not? So does my browser when I ask it to open a website.
- Zambyte 19d agorobots.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
- shermantanktop 19d ago> 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.
- Zambyte 19d agoWell that's what they're doing.
- Legend2440 19d agoTL;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.
- delichon 19d ago> Perplexity's agents can browse Amazon logged-in, with a username/password provided by the perplexity user. Grok Bots can do the same.
- embedding-shape 19d agocURL 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.
- huseyinkeles 19d agowhat's next? suing Chrome because it logs in to amazon on my behalf after i give it my amazon credentials?
- Legend2440 19d agoWell, 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.
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- gz5 19d agoCan'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.
- hamdingers 19d agoThis 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.
- kevin_thibedeau 19d agoThey'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.
- bshaughn 19d agoI'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.
- internet101010 19d agoDon'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.
- Terr_ 19d agoI 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 19d agoPiggybacking on this - can HuggingFace sue OAI? Do they have legal ground to do that?
- putlake 19d agoAnyone 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.
- Digory 19d agoI'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.
- willy_k 19d agoYes. 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).
- bjt 19d agoThey 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.
- dylan604 19d agoWould 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.
- phoghed 19d ago> Would there also not be some reputational damages In that case OpenAI should sue since they came out of this with a worse reputation.
- another_poster 19d ago[flagged]
- LPisGood 19d agoIt 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.
- cheeze 19d ago> suing a torrent aggregator Which has also been done :|
- LPisGood 19d agoRight, which is why it is a charitable comparison of the lawsuit, showing how it may be successful.
- another_poster 19d agoBut 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.
- neom 19d ago9th 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.
- eigencoder 19d agoI'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.
- advisedwang 19d agoAmazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.
- eigencoder 19d agoWhat do you mean?
- dcrazy 19d agoAmazon 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.
- eigencoder 19d agoI 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.
- shimman 19d agoNah, 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.
- dcrazy 19d agoWhat 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.
- cynicalsecurity 19d agoIt's just a harassment lawsuit. Amazon is going to lose, but they hope they could bully another company into what they want from them.
- MBCook 19d agoI 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 https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117270213574377193
- pbhjpbhj 19d agoSurely Amazon have paid Trump enough to win?
- mywittyname 19d agoAmazon winning seems like it would have far-reaching effects, given that it is activated by a user.
- hunterhandkerch 19d ago[flagged]
- dzonga 19d agothis 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.
- Yhippa 19d agohttps://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/CloudWatch_Synthetics_Canaries.html 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".
- ada1981 19d agoRemembering years ago when we lost $5MM of Bezo's money...
- nenadg 19d agoi 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 19d agoFunny 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.
- oblio 19d ago> and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot. Also: https://openai.com/index/amazon-partnership/ https://openai.com/index/amazon-partnership/
- dyauspitr 19d agoAmazon services is just an LLC?
- kube-system 19d agoIt's one of many of their wholly owned subsidaries
- mys1 19d agoI 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?
- j-bos 19d agoI don't see why it should be a gray area for me to use my computer the way I want to use my computer.
- dcrazy 19d agoThis is over a month old, for anyone like me who was confused.
- whatever1 19d agoIf web scraping is legal then hitting the public api Amazon shouldn’t also be legal?
- kube-system 19d agoYes, but this case isn't about that -- it is about logged in accounts.
- jptlnk 19d agonot 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge
- eliauelkouby 19d ago[flagged]
- at1as 19d agoMany 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 19d agoIdk 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
- embedding-shape 19d agoYou 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.
- varispeed 19d agoSo 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.
- cmiles8 19d agoThe 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.
- iforgotmypasswo 19d agoPattern 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.
- theturtletalks 19d agoPeople 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.
- johndhi 19d agoSounds cool. Needs network effects of lots of highly rated stores to succeed, I think.
- theturtletalks 19d agoYes but users can build adapters and bring their own stores.
- varispeed 19d agoWhy 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?
- peri-cl 19d agoTricking 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.
- chadgpt5 19d ago
- embedding-shape 19d ago> 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?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 19d agoHearing on Perplexity's Motion to Dismiss rescheduled; new date is November 20, 2026 https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.459191/gov.uscourts.cand.459191.120.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.45...
- cmiles8 19d agoAmazon 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.
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- AustinDev 19d agoIf 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.
- imglorp 19d agoI'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.
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- matheusmoreira 19d agoThere is nothing they hate more than user agents.
- tzs 19d agoIt 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.
- paweladamczuk 19d agoThey want to own the glass (the one in our pockets) so much.
- nubinetwork 19d agoInteresting that they say perplexity doesn't use a user agent, because they definitely do when they fetch my robots.txt every 5 minutes...
- keeda 19d agoIn 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.