AI shopping agent wins legal test; court rules user指令 implies user access
PuzzledBag931 · reddit · 2026-08-31
Amazon sued Perplexity's Comet agent, alleging unauthorized access, but the Ninth Circuit threw out the injunction. The court ruled that since Comet only acts on user instructions, the user is the one accessing the site, not Perplexity. This is the first appeals ruling defining whether an agent acting for someone counts as that person acting, weakening the "block agents at the door" legal approach.
Major platforms are routing around bans via different protocols:
- OpenAI & Stripe: Scoped single-use tokens inside chat; the model never sees the card.
- Google (AP2): Pre-authorized spend limits with credentials at checkout.
- Shopify (UCP): A shared catalog format allowing any agent to read a store without a walled checkout.
The Unsolved Problem: None of these protocols have a reputation layer. Agents rank vendors by declared price and ship date—fields easily spoofed by fake stores. Without a trust layer, agents cannot distinguish legitimate deals from scams, leading to potential fraud.
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