Amazon turns its Conditions of Use into an off switch for shopping agents

The shopper who lost a cart on Sunday evening had agreed to Amazon's Conditions of Use as a customer. The popup told them that "Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed" ^[2]. Todd Bishop reported it for GeekWire on Sunday night ^[3]. Muse books, buys and fills in forms, and it has been out since 8 September ^[15].

Amazon's public case is about permission. "We think it's 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 about whether or not to participate," Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson said in an emailed statement to Bloomberg ^[6]. She compared it to food delivery apps and the restaurants they take orders for, and to online travel agencies and airlines ^[7].

The complaints Amazon gave reporters are narrower and mostly technical. Meta never said Muse would access the store, Amazon told GeekWire, and the agent does not identify itself while browsing ^[8]. Amazon also says Muse appears to capture and store customer credentials ^[8]. Georgia Hennessy reported for Business Insider that Amazon accuses the agent of scraping account data and of bypassing the personalisation in Amazon's shopping pages, so people are shown products that ignore their own purchase history ^[9]. Meta answered the credentials point in its launch announcement, saying Muse "has no visibility into people's passwords or payment methods" ^[10]. Meta did not respond to requests for comment from Bloomberg, Business Insider or GeekWire ^[11].

Perplexity is the litigated version of the same objection. It launched Comet for iOS on 18 March 2026, nine days after the district court enjoined it ^[18]. In briefs filed on 1 April and 6 May 2026, Perplexity told the appeals court that "no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer" ^[20]. Amazon says its engineers watched exactly that traffic every day between 18 March and at least 11 May, 54 days ^[21][3]. Amazon's counsel wrote on 6 May identifying each statement by page and asking for a correction, and Perplexity repeated the statements in a reply brief filed later that day ^[22]. Five days after that, Perplexity's counsel wrote that "As a measure of good-faith, Perplexity has temporarily disabled the assistant feature on Amazon.com in Comet for iOS" ^[23].

Divide the damages Amazon claims, well beyond $260,000, by the session count in the complaint, and the store is pricing agent traffic at roughly $1.40 a session ^[24][1]. Split the engineering time eight ways and each of those people has put about 160 hours into it since July 2025 ^[2].

Muse was the number one free app in Apple's US App Store within a week, ahead of ChatGPT ^[16]. The ranking is by downloads, and the reporting does not cover repeat use.

Whether an agent can transact on a store someone else owns comes down to two tests about the store, not the model. First, the destination has to have agreed in writing to be in the agent's scope. Second, the store has to be able to see who is asking. Amazon says Muse fails the second because the agent does not identify itself while browsing ^[8], and it failed the first when Meta declined the request to take Amazon out of the experience ^[5]. The remedy was a popup the customer had to read.

Commercial ties leave the first test open. Amazon products have been purchasable inside Facebook and Instagram since 2023 ^[12], and Meta signed a multibillion-dollar deal in April to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon's cloud ^[13]. Amazon told GeekWire it was in direct conversation with Meta and declined to say whether it would sue ^[14].