The Ninth Circuit’s Perplexity vs Amazon ruling and what it could mean for sellers

[u/PuzzledBag931]

I’ve been reading the August 4 decision and I think it’s getting less attention than it deserves, especially from the seller side.

Quick background:

Amazon sued Perplexity over Comet, its browser that can shop on Amazon on a user’s behalf. Amazon got an injunction in March, but last month the appeals court tossed it. The key reasoning was that Comet acts only when instructed by the user, so the person accessing Amazon’s servers is effectively the user, rather than Perplexity itself.

If that reasoning sticks, stopping shopping agents through computer fraud claims gets a lot harder, and not just for Amazon. Which probably shifts more of the fight toward the protocols. And the three emerging approaches are pretty different.

OpenAI and Stripe’s model completes the purchase inside the chat. The merchant gets a scoped, single use token, so the card details never need to pass through them. Clean setup, but the tradeoff is that you don’t really own the customer relationship either.

Google’s AP2 works around a mandate. The buyer gives an agent permission in advance to spend within defined limits, and Google’s credential travels with the transaction at checkout.

Shopify’s UCP seems like the odd one out. It’s basically a common language that lets agents read a merchant’s catalogue directly, rather than forcing everything through somebody else’s checkout layer.

What I still can’t find a convincing answer to is the trust problem.

An agent can compare sellers using declared price, stock and delivery speed. But those are ultimately just claims made by the seller. A storefront with no inventory could theoretically offer the lowest price and fastest delivery, take the order, and look like the best option to the agent right up until something goes wrong.

Someone building an agent made an interesting point to me after I posted about this elsewhere: why not match what the seller is claiming against public or independently verifiable records before the agent sends them the order?

That got me thinking about whether the eventual model looks less like marketplace reviews and more like some version of a performance bond.

If you want agents to trust your claims about inventory, fulfilment or delivery, maybe there needs to be something economically at risk behind those claims. If what you represented turns out not to be true, there’s an actual cost rather than just a bad review after the fact.

I don’t know if a bond is the right mechanism. But some combination of external verification and economic skin in the game seems harder to game than simply letting agents rank whatever fields merchants publish.

Curious if anyone building in this area has seen this solved differently. The protocols seem to be getting pretty good at answering “how does an agent transact?” I’m less sure they’ve solved “why should the agent believe the seller?”

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