The Lawsuit That Could Change Online Shopping  ## Metadata - Author: [[Hard Fork AI]] - Full Title: The Lawsuit That Could Change Online Shopping - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/3bb2f61e-1f93-4ea6-8fd7-28c74139d01e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Legal Fight Over AI Shopping Agents** - Amazon sent legal threats to Perplexity over its Comet agent browsing Amazon to shop autonomously. - Perplexity framed Amazon's move as intimidation that blocks innovation and harms users. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 a size 10 and a half shoes that are black. Get the wide foot version for me and find ones that have good reviews and that can come in the next three days. Perplexity could go do that task for you. And well, essentially on the comment browser. And I've used Atlas. Opening eyes more if I'm being 100% 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 perplexity put out a whole blog post called the bullying is not innovation. So they're 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. ([Time 0:01:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0d1bb2b1-b6e2-497f-a5de-be917fa5fb68)) - **Using AI Browsers To Shop For Shoes** - Jaeden describes using Perplexity's Comet and OpenAI's Atlas to instruct an AI to find and buy specific shoes on Amazon. - He praises the experience as exactly what he wants from AI shopping agents. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 a size 10 and a half shoes that are black. Get the wide foot version for me and find ones that have good reviews and that can come in the next three days. Perplexity could go do that task for you. And well, essentially on the comment browser. And I've used Atlas. Opening eyes more if I'm being 100% 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. ([Time 0:01:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dc098290-1c50-4e82-87ec-2e0856e7ade3)) - **Amazon's Motive: Protecting Its Own AI Ambitions** - Jaeden suggests Amazon's motive is protecting its own Rufus AI and potential agent-shopping plans. - He argues Amazon fears being front-run by third-party agents like Comet. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 um they'll say that there's other reasons but in my opinion this is probably What what is going on here so amazon has responded to this whole blog post where they were basically talking about it. ([Time 0:02:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/11fe85bf-220e-47ed-96f0-b5a0b710caca)) - **Amazon Claims Agents Degrade Shopping** - Amazon says third-party apps should operate openly and respect service provider choices and claims Comet degrades shopping experience. - Jaeden disputes the degraded-experience claim and defends agentic browsing as useful. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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, 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 perplexes comment have the same obligation. And we've repeatedly requested that perplexity remove Amazon from the comment experience, particularly in light of this, of the significantly, okay, here's, 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 comment because comment is just degrading the shopping experience. ([Time 0:03:33](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9ee4a1d9-f6da-4e1a-be94-b4cfb15e3c4d)) - **Fix Platform UX To Reduce Agent Demand** - Consider why users prefer AI agents and fix the platform issues they avoid, like clutter, upsells, and unclear promoted content. - Improve filtering, transparency, and UX to reduce demand for third-party shopping agents. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer I would also say that like Amazon, instead of just trying to kick off these AI agents off the platform should probably ask themselves, why are people using comment 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 and then they can boost them to the top. And the argument there is that grocery stores do this with their generic brands as well. Don't really like it, but whatever. And then there's 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 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. ([Time 0:04:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3760fb75-8621-4bb4-802b-41703ba3529f)) - **Bot Identification Enables Platform Control** - Amazon insists agents must self-identify as bots so sites can manage them, which could let Amazon block or treat agents differently. - Jaeden warns identification would enable discriminatory blocking or limiting of agent access. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 third-party agents working on the of users just need to identify themselves. And basically, they're like, look, if Comet just identified themselves, then there would be no problem. 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 differently? ([Time 0:06:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bb985d7d-1d8a-45db-83d2-45344a97cf22)) - **Allow Agents To Act Like Personal Assistants** - Treat AI agents like personal assistants: allow them to act on behalf of users rather than banning them outright. - Let agents perform tasks concurrently to save users time and improve workflows. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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, I think 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 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 a warmup service, 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, like, I don't really care in a sense that a human, especially for perplexity'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, um, what I do with usually is with opening eyes atlas, but I'll have four tabs open and I'll give the agent like a task on each of those tabs that will go in 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. ([Time 0:07:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a74b1aab-d203-4563-a2b3-f588ac6099c2)) - **Bot Traffic Raises Cost And Policy Concerns** - Past disputes show web operators worry about bot traffic costs and evasion of no-crawl directives. - Jaeden acknowledges scraping concerns but differentiates user-directed agents from broad scraping. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 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 a warmup service, blah, blah, blah. There's all this stuff where basically bots cost more money. ([Time 0:08:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9a3898e7-6f37-4c00-9043-2554120d95d6)) - **Competition Will Force Platform Flexibility** - If Amazon blocks AI agents, users can switch to competitors like Best Buy or Walmart who permit agent shopping. - Market competition will pressure platforms to support agent-based shopping or lose users. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 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. ([Time 0:10:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c675d51b-b4ce-4d58-b33f-6b19d93b460d)) - **Amazon's UX Claim Feels Tone-Deaf** - Jaeden finds Amazon's claim of a degraded experience ironic given Amazon's cluttered UI and aggressive upsells. - He argues a cleaner interface would reduce the appeal of AI agents. Transcript: Jaeden Schafer 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 could 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. ([Time 0:10:55](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4e775d14-50a2-4c51-bb47-0542a2c888ed))