Sunday, August 2, 2026

— A weekly publication —

The Agentic Commerce Report

A weekly read of everything that moved in agentic commerce — protocols, payment rails, retailer pilots, regulation. Summarised, sourced, and stitched to what came before.

US Court Issues Order in Amazon-Perplexity Agentic Purchasing Dispute

Issue 16March 9–15, 2026Synthesised from 2 sources

Edited by Reviewed against primary sources

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.

Events this issue

2 events
Pilots
launch

SAP launches Next-Gen Ariba rebuilt on BTP with agentic AI as foundation for autonomous procurement

SAP begins phased rollout of a ground-up Ariba rebuild on Business Technology Platform with quarterly releases and embedded Joule agents throughout the procurement lifecycle.

Next-Gen SAP Ariba is a ground-up rebuild, not an incremental update: SAP replaced legacy on-premise architecture that predates cloud-native agent infrastructure. The quarterly release model — replacing Ariba's historical multi-year upgrade cycles — engineers for an era where the agent layer evolves faster than the application layer. The Joule Agent in Intake Management, planned for general availability in June 2026, interprets procurement requests in conversational natural language, determines the correct workflow, and routes across SAP and non-SAP systems including Coupa and Jaggaer. This cross-system routing signals SAP's intent to become the orchestration layer for enterprise procurement regardless of which suite a customer runs. The announcement precedes by two months SAP's broader Autonomous Enterprise vision unveiled at Sapphire 2026 (2026-w20-procurement-sap-autonomous-enterprise-sapphire), establishing the Ariba rebuild as the foundational infrastructure for the larger autonomous stack.

  1. SAP News Center
Regulation
regulation

Court grants Amazon preliminary injunction blocking Perplexity's Comet browser from Amazon accounts

Federal judge bars Perplexity's Comet AI browser from accessing password-protected Amazon accounts on behalf of users, citing unauthorised access concerns.

The injunction is the first US federal-court action specifically targeting an AI agent's access to password-protected accounts, populating the otherwise thin Regulation lane alongside the UK FCA's 2026 priorities (2026-w13-regulation-uk-fca-agentic-payments-priorities). The order draws a legal line between first-party agent deployment — Amazon Rufus serving Amazon customers (2025-w47-pilots-amazon-rufus-auto-buy) — and third-party agent access to the same accounts. Perplexity's parallel work on its free shopping agent (2025-w47-aeo-perplexity-paypal-instant-buy) sits outside the injunction's scope. The ruling foregrounds the authentication-versus-impersonation problem that FIDO Alliance later targets with its Agentic Auth working group (2026-w18-standards-fido-agentic-working-groups) and that Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol (2025-w42-payments-visa-trusted-agent-protocol) addresses at the network level.

  1. CNBC