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(CN) — A federal judge on Monday granted Amazon.com a preliminary injunction against the use on its website of an AI-powered shopping tool created by Perplexity AI that can compare products, prices and reviews on behalf of users.
Senior U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney in San Francisco agreed with the online retail behemoth that it is likely to succeed on the merits of its claim that Perplexity’s Comet application violates the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.
“Amazon has provided strong evidence that Perplexity, through its Comet browser, accesses with the Amazon user’s permission, but without authorization by Amazon, the user’s password-protected account, thereby obtaining information as to the user’s private Amazon account information, and that such information is transmitted to Perplexity’s servers for the purpose of conducting said user’s requested tasks,” the Bill Clinton appointee wrote.
In addition, Chesney said, the balance of hardships — one of several factors a judge needs to consider in deciding whether a preliminary injunction is warranted — came out in favor of Amazon, notwithstanding Perplexity’s argument that it would lose its first-mover advantage in AI-powered shopping tools, because the Comet application can still be used on other websites.
An attorney for San Francisco-based Perplexity didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
Amazon sued Perplexity, which reportedly includes Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo among its investors and which was valued at $21 billion as of early this year, in November.
Amazon says it requires automated AI agents, such Comet, that access its online store and private account information on behalf of registered Amazon customers to transparently identify themselves.
“Rather than be transparent, Perplexity has purposely configured its Comet AI software to not identify the Comet AI agent’s activities in the Amazon Store: Perplexity falsely identifies its Comet AI agent activity as coming from Google Chrome,” Amazon claims. “As a result, Perplexity’s Comet AI agent covertly poses as a human customer shopping in the Amazon Store on a Google Chrome browser.”
The Comet browser and AI agent, Amazon argues citing a news article from October, are vulnerable to attacks from cyber criminals who can “hijack” the AI agent to compromise personal and private data from Amazon’s customers who use the shopping assistant.
Perplexity argued in its opposition to a preliminary injunction that Amazon isn’t so much interested in cybersecurity as it is in eliminating a competitor to its own Quick Suite agentic AI tools.
“This lawsuit is a bald attempt by Amazon to block its own customers from using defendant Perplexity’s groundbreaking Comet AI Assistant on Amazon.com,” Perplexity said. “Why? Because AI agents don’t have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with and cannot be upsold to buy more products. Those are the real reasons Amazon filed this suit and seeks a preliminary injunction — not its claimed altruistic concern about protecting consumer data and the ‘customer experience.’”
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