Amazon has just sent legal threats to Perplexity over their browser Comet going and doing autonomous agent shopping on Amazon.
We're going to get into all of this on the podcast today.
Perplexity has responded.
Amazon has responded back.
We have an absolute feud going on, and I for one am on Perplexity's side.
I think Amazon's being ridiculous for a number of reasons.
I'll outline all of those below.
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All right, let's get into what Amazon's talking about here.
So they sent over a legal threat where essentially they told Perplexity that their agent browser in its online store needed to stop coming to Amazon.
Their Comet browser, which personally I have used.
If you haven't, I recommend it.
Comet is an amazing AI browser, and Atlas from OpenAI is an amazing AI browser.
Both of them have a little side panel on the side.
You give it a prompt.
You're like hey, go to Amazon and buy me size 10 1⁄2 men's shoes that are black, get the wide foot version for me and find ones that you know are have good reviews and that can come in the next three days.
Perplexity could go do that task for you.
And and well, essentially on the comment browser, and I've used Atlas opening eyes more, if I'm being a hundred percent honest, but I've also tried to comment and it was great.
So yeah, overall for me, this is fantastic as a user.
This is literally what I want.
Finally, it's great technology and Amazon is mad about it.
So yeah, Perplexi put out a whole blog post called Bullying is Not Innovation.
So they very strongly are accusing Amazon of trying to bully them.
The opening on their blog post.
They have a whole blog post about this, but they say the point of technology is to make life better for people.
We call it innovation, but it's just the constant process of asking how to make things better.
Bullying, on the other hand, is when large corporations use legal threats and intimidation to block innovation and make life worse for people.
I'm not going to lie.
I mean, bullying somehow, I don't know.
I don't like the word bullying when it comes to like tech companies having a dispute.
But I completely agree with the sentiment here.
I think that Perplexity made something useful.
And I think the number one reason why Amazon is trying to block Comet from doing AI agentic shopping on Amazon is because Amazon has their Rufus AI, which virtually nobody uses.
And they're probably working on an agentic AI shopping tool. perhaps.
And I think they're worried about being front run by this.
They'll say that there's other reasons, but in my opinion, this is probably what is going on here.
So Amazon has responded to this whole blog post where they were basically talking about it.
And this is what Amazon came up with.
They came up with a quote statement about perplexity.
They said we think it fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions or whether or not to participate.
This helps ensure a positive customer experience, and it is how others operate, including food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders from.
Blah blah, blah.
Then it says, agentic third-party applications such as Perplexity Comma have the same obligation.
We've repeatedly requested that Perplexity remove Amazon from the Comma experience, particularly in light of the significantly okay here's Amazon roasting them, they say the significantly degraded shopping and customer service experience it provides.
Ouch.
They're like, we don't want to be on Comet because Comet is just degrading the shopping experience.
Okay, as a user of Comet and Atlas, that's my main one, but they're basically the same and I have used Comet in the past.
So as a user of Comet, I would say it is not a degraded shopping experience.
I would also say that Amazon, instead of just trying to kick off these AI agents off the platform, should probably ask themselves Why are people using Comet on our platform?
Perhaps it's the fact that when I go to Amazon, it is incredibly cluttered.
It is always trying to upsell me.
It's hard to decide what is a promoted post, what is not a promoted post.
What is Amazon promoting their own in-house Amazon products that they've decided to build, which I think is anti-competitive to companies?
They can see the data of every single company, what they're selling, and so they just make clone products products, and then they can boost them to the top.
And I, and the argument there is that grocery stores do this with their generic brands as well.
Don't really like it, but whatever.
Um, and then there's the the point that Amazon never lets me sort or filter by like price on Amazon.
I'm just like, okay, like I want a bamboo toothbrush, but please just show me the cheapest one.
And they're like, no, no, you want to see the featured one.
This is a $20 bamboo toothbrush and it's nice.
No Amazon.
I just want like Amazon.
A $5 one, is there nothing under $10 on your entire platform?
There are, you just have to look for them on like page seven.
So I think Amazon obviously has strong incentives for pricing things a certain way, for pushing certain products and for not making their platform very straightforward to use.
Enter the solution an AI agent where I can just say go find me the freaking bamboo toothbrush that is 7 or less and can get here tomorrow.
Because I know it exists because I purchased it before.
I just can't remember.
And it was on a different account.
So it's not my history, blah, blah, blah, whatever. and your agent can do it.
So Amazon doesn't like that.
Amazon is saying, no, it needs to stop.
Okay.
Apparently this is all a very straightforward thing.
And I'll give you the arguments on both sides of this.
The way that Amazon is approaching this.
They say that you know third-party agents working on the behalf of users just need to identify themselves.
And basically they're like look, if Comet just identified themselves, then there would be no problem.
Like their cease and desist isn't like Comet needs to shut itself down or permanently ban Amazon, although I think that is their request.
They're just saying look, it just needs to identify itself as a bot and then everyone's going to be happy.
But the risk, of course, is that Amazon, as soon as it is now, you know, as soon as it's able to identify Comet as a bot, then all of a sudden it can just block Comet.
So they're like, just identify yourself.
And then like, you know, the question is like, why do you want us to identify ourselves?
Are you going to treat us any different?
Like, obviously, If you want us to identify that it's a bot, you want to treat it differently.
And how would you treat it differently?
Number one, basically block it.
Or maybe they could be really scammy and be like fine, you can use comment, but we're only if it identifies itself as a bot.
We're only showing promoted posts.
They could just do ridiculous things.
So I don't actually think this is necessary.
And here's the reason why.
If I have a personal assistant, I can ask my personal assistant to go do the exact same thing for me.
They could go on the computer and search for bamboo toothbrushes and try to find the one that's the type I like blah blah, blah.
Or the right sort of orthopedic for my foot, or whatever.
I tell it to right.
So if I could send a personal assistant, why would I not be able to just send my AI agent to go do the same task?
So I think that it's disingenuous of Amazon to just say we just want to know and it has a degraded shopping experience.
Like, no, it does not.
So anyways, that just drives me crazy.
One thing that I will say is that a lot of people are pointing out is that this is a whole spat that isn't new, just between Perplexity and Amazon.
Cloudflare had a similar kind of public feud a while back, where they published a research report and they basically were accusing Perplexity of scraping websites that had been blocked.
There was a whole bunch of drama in relation to this, this whole report.
It was like perplexity is using stealth undeclared crawlers to evade website.
No crawl directives.
And listen, like I sort of get where they're coming from because, on the one hand, companies like Wikipedia said that like 30 of their traffic is bot traffic and they have to pay for all that bot traffic.
And it's actually more expensive than regular human traffic because it gets like these random assets that are less likely to be visited.
So they're on like cold servers and they got to warm up servers, blah, blah, blah.
There's all this stuff where basically bots cost more money.
So I sort of understand that, but at the same time I don't really care in a sense that a human especially for Pluriplexity's comment a human is sending the AI agent to go do a task.
So I can do four things at once.
I have four tabs open on.
What I do usually is with opening AI's Atlas, but I'll have four tabs open and I'll give the agent a task on each of those tabs.
That will go and do my task for me.
And I don't want the websites to be like, are you a bot?
Like, I don't want it to treat them any different.
Just act like I'm doing it.
It's saving me four times the time and I'm on my other tab figuring out the next thing I need to do.
Well, those four tabs are just doing something for me.
Like I got to go copy and paste all these RRS feed links from these like different shows to this spreadsheet.
And it's like a pain in the butt.
Just tell my agent to go do that for me.
I don't have to go figure it out.
So anyways, and I don't, I also don't want the websites to know that it's not just me doing it or my virtual assistant on my behalf.
So, Yes, like are we sending AI agents to go crawl all of Wikipedia and scrape its content?
Yeah, I think that could be problematic, but like an assistant AI agent going and doing something that an actual user is asking it to do, this is not controversial.
Amazon is ridiculous.
And I think at the end of the day, if I can't go to Amazon with my AI agent to go do something for me and Amazon just blocks comment, blocks AI agents, fine, I'll go to Best Buy or some other platform or Walmart, I guess,
Like, at the end of the day, I guess the only competition Amazon really has in America is like Walmart, with the shopping experience online, and Walmart, you know, isn't as good because it's not as fast.
But I mean, I think that's what it will come down to.
Like, if Amazon truly doesn't let you shop with your AI agent and you want to shop with an AI agent, you'll just move on to something different.
So like, hopefully Amazon kind of reverses trend on this and realizes this is the way that people will be shopping in the future and that it's a genuinely useful thing.
But we'll see where that goes.
I just...
The final thing I'll leave you with is my absolute shock at them saying the degraded shopping experience.
Okay Amazon, as if scrolling through a thousand links on your horribly ugly UI website isn't a degraded shopping experience.
You are literally an assault to my eyes when I'm using Amazon.
They just make their website pretty, I promise.
It wouldn't hurt anyone.
I feel like I'm on freaking Craigslist half the time.
Okay, I'm done. ripping Amazon.
Appreciate their contributions to the AI landscape.
Don't appreciate this policy.
I'll call it out when I see it.
All right.
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It's only 20 bucks, so it's a pretty great value for the features it offers.
Thanks so much for tuning in, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
