A federal judge has issued a court order barring Perplexity's AI browser agent, Comet, from placing orders on Amazon on behalf of users. US District Judge Maxine Chesney ruled that Amazon had provided 'strong evidence' supporting the need for the injunction, halting a feature that allowed users to shop on Amazon by delegating the transaction to an AI agent running inside Perplexity's browser.

The ruling is one of the first significant legal actions to directly restrict what AI agents can do on third-party platforms without explicit platform consent. Amazon's core concern appears to be that AI agents accessing and transacting on its platform — without going through authorized integration channels — creates accountability gaps, terms-of-service violations, and potentially competitive risks.

The case is being closely watched as a bellwether for a rapidly emerging legal question: when AI agents browse the web and take actions on behalf of users, who is responsible for ensuring compliance with platform rules, and can platforms legally block agents they have not authorized?

What This Means for Your Business

What This Means for Your Business: This ruling has direct implications for any company building or deploying AI agents that interact with external platforms, marketplaces, or third-party services. The decision signals that platforms can and will seek legal remedies against AI agents operating outside authorized API access, and that courts may be receptive to those arguments. If your AI roadmap includes agents that browse, transact, or extract data from external sites, your legal and product teams need to assess platform terms proactively — the era of agents doing whatever they can technically accomplish is encountering legal limits.