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A US federal court issued an injunction this week 1 in a dispute between Amazon and Perplexity, relating to Perplexity’s AI assistant placing orders on Amazon’s platform through mechanisms outside Amazon’s approved API pathways. The order temporarily restricts Perplexity’s agent-initiated purchase flow for Amazon storefronts pending further proceedings. Amazon’s complaint cited violations of its seller agreement by automated purchasing agents bypassing its own agentic commerce programme.
The injunction requires Perplexity to restrict agent purchase flows to explicit user-confirmed transactions for each Amazon purchase until the court addresses the underlying contractual question. Perplexity stated it would comply while contesting the terms of service interpretation. The case centres on whether general agent purchasing, using a user’s saved payment credentials, constitutes unauthorised access when conducted outside the retailer’s sanctioned integration.
The case emerged six months after Perplexity launched its PayPal-integrated buy feature in November 2025 2. The dispute arose specifically from agents placing orders on Amazon’s platform — a retailer that has its own agentic commerce programme and API pathway — rather than through Amazon’s sanctioned agent integration.
This is the first federal court action in the US to directly address agent commerce transactions and the first Regulation-lane event in the tracking period. The case raises questions about which purchase pathways agent assistants may use without explicit merchant authorisation — questions that none of the payment protocols or standards published to date address.
Federal judge bars Perplexity's Comet AI browser from accessing password-protected Amazon accounts on behalf of users, citing unauthorised access concerns.
CNBC