Amazon Blocks Meta’s Muse, Accuses Perplexity of Misleading Court

Amazon has escalated its legal and technical war against AI shopping agents, taking simultaneous action against two major tech players. The e-commerce giant blocked access to Meta’s new AI assistant, Muse, while simultaneously filing an amended complaint against Perplexity AI, accusing the search company of misleading a federal appeals court regarding its data practices.

The restriction on Meta began over the weekend, prompting users who attempted to use Muse for shopping tasks to encounter a specific warning popup. The message stated: “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s Conditions of Use, to which our customers have agreed.” Todd Bishop at GeekWire first reported the block on Sunday night, with Amazon later confirming to Bloomberg that enforcement started on Sunday evening. This move came after Meta refused a request from Amazon to exclude Amazon.com from Muse’s capabilities.

Disputes Over Transparency and Data

Amazon spokesperson Lara Hendrickson outlined the company’s stance in a statement to Bloomberg, emphasizing the need for transparency in third-party applications. She said: “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.”

Hendrickson drew parallels to established industries, noting that online travel agencies must adhere to airline policies just as food delivery apps follow restaurant rules. She added: “Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.”

However, Amazon’s objections are more specific than these general principles suggest. According to reports from Business Insider and GeekWire, Amazon claims Muse bypasses personalized shopping features, ignoring user history to display generic products. There are also concerns that the agent captures and stores customer credentials without proper identification. Meta addressed the security concerns in its launch announcement, stating: “Muse ‘has no visibility into people’s passwords or payment methods’, the company said in its launch announcement. Anything a user shares goes into secure storage, it said, so the agent can use it without seeing it.” Meta did not provide further comment to media outlets.

Despite these tensions, the two companies remain business partners. Since 2023, Amazon products have been shoppable within Facebook and Instagram. In April, Meta signed a multibillion-dollar agreement to run agentic AI workloads on Amazon Web Services. Muse launched on September 8 and quickly became the top free app in the US Apple App Store, surpassing ChatGPT within a week.

Legal Battle with Perplexity AI

On the same day as the Meta block, Amazon filed a 41-page amended complaint against Perplexity, alleging computer fraud, violations of California computer data access statutes, and tortious interference with contract. The lawsuit focuses heavily on Comet for iOS, a version of Perplexity’s AI launched on March 18, 2026, shortly after a district court injunction was issued.

Amazon alleges that Comet copies a user’s session cookie and sends it to Perplexity’s cloud servers, where a virtual browser requests pages directly from Amazon. The complaint argues that this architecture means “No user device touches Amazon’s servers,” a direct contradiction to statements Perplexity made to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In briefs filed in April and May 2026, Perplexity claimed that “no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer.”

Amazon’s engineering team monitored this traffic between March 18 and at least May 11. After Amazon’s counsel highlighted these discrepancies in a letter on May 6, Perplexity repeated its original statements in a reply brief. Five days later, Perplexity’s lawyers responded: “As a measure of good-faith, Perplexity has temporarily disabled the assistant feature on Amazon.com in Comet for iOS.”

Financial Stakes and Strategic Shifts

Amazon is seeking damages exceeding $260,000, citing significant resource allocation to counter Perplexity’s agents. The company states that eight traffic engineers spent at least 1,280 hours addressing the issue since July 2025. By June 15, 2026, Comet had executed at least 185,712 sessions on Amazon.com.

The complaint also highlights Perplexity’s use of deceptive user-agent strings, specifically impersonating Google Chrome on macOS. Cloudflare previously flagged this behavior in August 2025, removing Perplexity from its list of verified operators. Perplexity changed its agent signature each time Amazon developed new detection methods.

This legal strategy marks a shift in Amazon’s approach following a setback in August. The Ninth Circuit had ruled that the user, not the AI provider, was accessing Amazon’s computers under federal anti-hacking laws. By arguing that Comet’s architecture involves direct server-to-server communication without user device involvement, Amazon aims to circumvent that precedent.

The core issue revolves around advertising revenue. Amazon generated over $68 billion in ad sales last year, a model reliant on human impressions. Agent traffic forces Amazon to build detection systems to ensure advertisers are not billed for bot activity. Amazon is not inherently opposed to AI agents; it integrated Alexa into search and offers a “Buy for Me” feature that allows brands to opt out. However, CEO Andy Jassy previously criticized the current state of agentic shopping, noting pricing errors. He told Bloomberg in April: “We’re having conversations with all those folks to try and make that better and find something that works for customers and all the companies.” Five months later, those conversations have manifested as legal filings and access blocks.