Credit: Amazon Amazon fought AI shopping agents on two fronts on Monday. It blocked Muse, Meta’s new AI assistant, from Amazon.com. It also filed an amended complaint against Perplexity, accusing the company of misleading a federal appeals court. The block came first.
People who sent Muse to shop on Amazon over the weekend began seeing a popup. “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed,” it read. Todd Bishop reported it for GeekWire on Sunday night. Amazon later told Bloomberg that blocking began on Sunday evening. Meta had declined a request to take Amazon out of Muse.
What Amazon says is wrong with Muse Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson set out the company’s position in an emailed statement to Bloomberg. “We think it’s 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 about whether or not to participate,” she said. She compared it to food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for. Online travel agencies and airlines work the same way, she added. “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.” The specific objections are narrower than the statement suggests. Amazon told GeekWire that Meta never said Muse would access the store.
The agent does not identify itself while browsing, Amazon says, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials. Georgia Hennessy reported for Business Insider that Amazon also accuses Muse of scraping account data. Agents bypass the personalisation built into Amazon’s shopping pages, the company told her, showing people products that ignore their own history. Meta has answered the credentials point in advance, though not the block itself.
Muse “has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods”, the company said in its launch announcement. Anything a user shares goes into secure storage, it said, so the agent can use it without seeing it. Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg, Business Insider or GeekWire. The two companies are business partners None of this is happening between strangers.
Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023. Meta also signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon’s cloud. Amazon told GeekWire it was in direct conversation with Meta, and declined to say whether it would sue. Meta launched Muse on 8 September.
It books, buys and fills in forms. Within a week it was the number one free app in Apple’s US App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. The second front, filed the same day Jason Del Rey, who writes the retail newsletter The Aisle, flagged on X that Amazon filed an amended complaint against Perplexity on the same day. It runs to 41 pages.
It pleads computer fraud, the California computer data access statute, and tortious interference with contract. The new material concerns Comet for iOS. Perplexity launched that version on 18 March 2026, nine days after the district court enjoined it. On iOS, Amazon alleges, Comet copies the user’s Amazon session cookie to Perplexity’s own cloud servers.
Those servers run a virtual browser and request pages from Amazon directly. “No user device touches Amazon’s servers,” the complaint states. That architecture matters because of what Perplexity told the appeals court. In briefs filed on 1 April and 6 May 2026, it represented that “no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer”. Amazon says its engineers watched exactly that traffic every day between 18 March and at least 11 May.
Amazon’s counsel wrote to Perplexity’s counsel on 6 May. The letter identified each statement by page and asked for a correction. Perplexity repeated the statements in a reply brief filed later that day. Five days later its counsel wrote back. “As a measure of good-faith, Perplexity has temporarily disabled the assistant feature on Amazon.com in Comet for iOS,” the letter said.
The numbers Amazon is putting on it Amazon claims damages well beyond $260,000. Eight members of its traffic engineering team have spent at least 1,280 hours on the agent since July 2025, it says. As of 15 June 2026, Comet had run at least 185,712 sessions on Amazon.com. The complaint also returns to the user-agent string, the line of text a browser sends to identify itself.
Comet sends Google Chrome’s. “Perplexity chooses that value, Perplexity codes it into the software Perplexity distributes,” the filing reads. Perplexity has changed it each time Amazon learned to detect the agent, it adds. The filing cites Cloudflare, which reported in August 2025 that Perplexity ran an undeclared crawler impersonating Chrome on macOS. Cloudflare removed the company from its list of verified operators.
Why the ground has shifted to contracts Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity in March. It lost it on 4 August. The Ninth Circuit held that the user, not the AI company, was the one accessing Amazon’s computers under federal anti-hacking law, and the court refused a rehearing on 10 September. The Comet for iOS allegations aim squarely at that holding, because on Amazon’s account no user device sits in the middle at all.
The Muse popup points the same way. It accuses nobody of hacking. It cites the Conditions of Use. Amazon amended those on 30 May 2025 to add an Agent Terms section, requiring agents to identify themselves in the user-agent string as “Agent/[agent name]”.
Perplexity has not filed a response to the amended complaint. Its public position, quoted in Amazon’s own filing, is that Amazon is “demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon”. What is actually at stake Amazon generated more than $68bn in advertising revenue last year, GeekWire noted, a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products. The complaint makes the point in its own language.
Agent traffic forces Amazon to build new detection systems, it says, so advertisers are billed only for human impressions. Amazon is not opposed to agents as such. It put Alexa in the search bar in May. Its Buy for Me feature shops external brand sites, identifies itself, and lets brands opt out.
This month Amazon struck a deal to let its advertisers into ChatGPT. It has also moved to block shopping agents from Google and OpenAI, and AI shopping beat search on its own Prime Day in June. Chief executive Andy Jassy told Bloomberg in April that agentic shopping left much to be desired. The bots often got pricing wrong, he said. “We’re having conversations with all those folks to try and make that better and find something that works for customers and all the companies.” Five months on, one of those conversations is a popup and the other is a court docket.
Leave a Reply