Several points remain open. Courts have not settled the legal status of shopping agents on Amazon. In March 2026, a court temporarily blocked Perplexity's Comet bot from the site, but an appeals court later allowed it to keep shopping for buyers, also on a temporary basis. Amazon's own position is contradictory: it does not currently permit autonomous shopping on its site, yet it has built Rufus, a tool that browses the site, recommends products, and adds them to carts, and it opened its seller platform to Anthropic's Claude, in which it has invested $13 billion. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said rival agents are not yet good at tailoring purchases to individuals and often show incorrect prices and delivery estimates. Agent shopping is still early, and no date has been set for Amazon to change its policy.
The stakes extend beyond retail. Amazon captures roughly 40 cents of every dollar spent online in the U.S., and its advertising business generates tens of billions of dollars a year. When an AI agent handles the purchase, shoppers skip the sponsored listings and ads that drive a large share of Amazon's profit, which is why the advertising model is the real exposure. Attorneys advising marketplaces, brands, or platforms should track three things: the appeals in the Perplexity matter, any formal Amazon policy on third-party agents, and whether merchants adopt standards such as the Model Context Protocol, which investor Chamath Palihapitiya has urged for making inventory and payments available to agents.