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- Hacker News
- Pattern I’m continually seeing.
User: I want to access what your business provides via AI.[1]
Business: I am not incentivized to do that. You should use our specific AI workflow and agents directly in our software.
User: That gives me a fraction of the value I get when AI has the full context for what I’m trying to do and talks to all the software and services I use.
I suspect this is an opportunity for previous also-ran companies to gain market share or new companies to break into markets.
[1] Usually something less stupid than AI buying something for someone, but to each their own.
- I'm just fascinated by the massive volume of new legal implications that keep arising. Copyright holders vs scraping and training. Psychologically vulnerable people vs chatbots. Hiring discrimination, defamation, wrong face rec, privacy. Etc^10. The law, and society ethics, were so unprepared for all this.
The lawyers are the obvious winners as always.
by imglorp - Many systems are explicitly built around a certain level of friction. Things can be easy and transparent (but not *too* easy or transparent).
Agentic AI collapses that in ways that threaten existing business models, especially in retail (but also credit card points, discount retailers, mail in rebates and sales, cheap flights, etc).
Either it'll be forbidden, or businesses will have to adapt in ways that may not be favorable to Amazon, etc.
by at1as - It wasn't clear to me if Comet is doing something that was purposefully built in or trained in to let it do things on Amazon, or if it was built/trained to try to do things on any website.
From what the net tells me it is the latter. There is no special "work with Amazon" stuff.
If that's true I expect will lose when the actual trial takes place and when that is appealed. (The decision today is just about a preliminary injunction before they get to actually trying to decide the outcome of the case).
I expect the reasoning will be similar to that used in copyright cases when the question was if the user is the sole infringer or the tool maker can also be liable. There it came down to whether the tool has substantial non-infringing uses.
I'm sure Perplexity will have trouble showing that there are a large number of website owners that don't mind Comet helping people on those sites so unless something was specifically built into Comet for Amazon I expect that will be good enough.
by tzs - Funny that they aren’t targeting OpenAI and Anthropic’s computer use agents, which can do the exact same thing, and probably do it at a much larger scale given their userbases. The difference of course is that both OpenAI and Anthropic are hosted on AWS Bedrock, and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.by binlog
- > and Amazon is a huge investor in Anthropic to boot.by oblio
- In a past job I owned the infrastructure for scraping and crawling the Internet, and this included accessing highly personal data and executing online actions at the user’s request. Being prudent about the legality of things, my team frequently clarified use cases with Legal. The answer we got was that anything we do on behalf of a user in service of the user’s explicit request, is generally OK.
As long as it’s not otherwise unlawful, of course, e.g. no bypassing security measures, which is generally verboten for users and agents alike. (Websites try to leverage this aspect by throwing up bot-specific security measures.) Caveats: this was an decade+ ago, our use-cases were different, and case law has changed since then. But simplistically, anything a human can legally do, software can also do for them.
This makes sense to me. In fact it is explicitly encoded in the language of the web: browsers are identified as “User Agents” after all.
We just happen to be in an era where our User Agents are now much more autonomous than before, and this threatens a lot of moats built around human attention.
by keeda - The appeals courts overturning of Amazon’s initial win (injunction) here is interesting. It’s basically like liability in reverse. If a user is responsible for what an AI agent does on its behalf then the other side of that equation can’t say “hey this AI is doing bad things” since the AI is just an extension of the user.
Amazon tried to go after the AI and its maker but seems the court is nudging Amazon to say if you have a problem with this then go after your customers as they’re the ones doing this.
And Amazon’s customers are only doing this because the shopping experience on the website is terrible and Amazon’s own AI is a hot mess.
by cmiles8 - People don’t realize how big of a threat LLMs are to marketplaces like Amazon, because down the line people will just be talking to AI agents to help them find products, check out, do all of these things.
So you’re probably like, why can’t I just use ChatGPT to do that? And you can, but ChatGPT is trying to become the new Amazon. They are trying to vet stores that can check out through ChatGPT officially, and so you’re just trading one master for another.
It’s why I’m building an open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace. It’s powered by agentic commerce and we include a list of vetted stores but you can bring your own.
- This was Google's big announcement at their last I/O conference: That Google would become the agent handling all forms of commerce on behalf of the average person worldwide.by Shakahs
- Amazon still probably make it via AWS, but other websites you may be right.
- Sounds cool. Needs network effects of lots of highly rated stores to succeed, I think.by johndhi
- I don't want "vetted" stores. I don't care if it's open-source or decentralized or interoperable (though, fine I guess if it is). What I actually want is stores that are scraped, preferably adversarially. When Amazon, Walmart et. al. try to shut you down, I will know you have something worth using.by DaveFr
- Isn't the value on same day delivery? Returns, warehouses, drivers, customer support all of that? How chatgpt is going to help with that?.by kelvinjps10
- I've mixed opinions on that. For example, there are products like Google Shopping or Google Travel etc. They show up bunch of stores where you can buy a flight ticket or a particular product from.
However, in the end most people just end up buying it from top 2-3 marketplaces anyway, not because its cheaper, but also because they can trust it, it arrives in 2 days, and you can easily return it if you don't want. So if I'm going to most likely buy something from Amazon anyway, why not just use Amazon web page. They've had one click buy button for ages.
by truncate - The funny thing to me is that, for years, Shopify has been trying to position their Shop app as an Amazon alternative, but just can't get the traction. Shopify and Amazon are two very different business models - but man, Tobi and Harley want that money!
ChatGPT comes along, and suddenly it has a real shot at the global customer capture that Shopify could never manage, so they jump in bed, and release a series of garbage collaborations, some of which got rolled back (Shop on ChatGPT, but you can only have one item in your cart, lulz), and some of which just keep mutating. Shopify fumbled pretty badly, and it was wild to watch the entire industry go from "You'll be buying through the LLMs this year" to "So, let's talk about AEO, GEO, and discovery..." like nothing happened.
None of the AI companies seem to have their heads screwed on straight about ecommerce, except potentially Google. The payment processors are sniffing around, too, since at the end of all the discovery, that order needs an easy means of processing payment.
I think your open-source, decentralized, interoperable marketplace is a noble effort, but you're up against multi-billion-dollar business interests who are looking to capture revenue from processing, and have dozens, if not hundreds of people on the case not only from a development standpoint, but from a business and marketing standpoint. Maybe you've got a team like that under you, too. Best of luck.
I've thought from the start that the strongest possibilities for ChatGPT to monetize boil down to advertising (so many ethical problems), and becoming a marketplace that finally dislodges Amazon. But that is a VERY tall mountain to climb.
by leviathant - Amazon is not just the frontend. There is a whole supply chain side of it with warehouses, distributors, couriers, etc. Inventory and stock readiness, shipping, and other things will continue to be bottlenecks for consumerism at scale.by hmokiguess
- > Amazon.com Services, LLC filed suit against Perplexity AI, Inc., an artificial intelligence company, asserting that Perplexity’s web browser tool, Comet, unlawfully accessed Amazon’s website in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). Perplexity’s Comet browser includes an AI “Assistant” that, when activated by a user, navigates Amazon.com on the user’s behalf, sending browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. Amazon claimed that this use of the Assistant, despite their explicit prohibition, amounted to unauthorized access to its servers.by metayrnc
- Isn't this how every agent works these days? Apple and Google are working on tool calling for apps, but that's still going to be backstopped by screen scraping for years very likely.
It's a good bet that everybody's got equivalent CFAA boilerplate in their terms, so I guess all agentic automations are crimes now.
by Zigurd - My understanding of the case law on this subject is that courts are extremely wary of letting terms of service violations rise to the level of federal crime. It essentially endows anyone with a domain name into an authority which can create federal law on demand.by LPisGood
- I remember when I (naively, but not alone) thought that the Personal Computer would let us--consumers, individuals--express our own agency and priorities and control, a kind of democratized capital mini-factory anyone (or group) could tailor to their own needs.
Nowadays it feels more like "Visitors shall think what our brain-stream tells you to think, or be guilty of contempt of business model."
Is there any important legal difference between what's happening here versus a bunch of friends running a "share and notice favorite deals" collective via plugin+server?
by Terr_ - > express our own agency
ironically a local model and Playwright/OpenClaw is pretty close
by pas - I'm naive on the law around this, but it seems like Amazon.com shouldn't have standing here. What Perplexity does, from my perspective, is essentially the same as when I allow Firefox, Chrome, or Safari (or any other browser software) to see my credentials and access Amazon's website on my behalf.by eigencoder
- It’s quite clearly not the sameby hbcdbff
- The facts are something like this:
1- Amazon owns servers and serves the client-interface ot interact with their servers. 2- They make public their Terms of Service and they make users (with accounts) agree to them. 3- The terms include a (very standard) "you can only use our service through the interface you provide, you may not automate this interface" clause. 4- Users violate this clause when they use an agent and browser-use. 5- Perplexity provided browser-use features that were used, by design, for users to break this clause.
From those facts, as shown to you, do you think Amazon doesn't have a case?
by TZubiri - Your feeling turned it to be correct. Amazon lost the case in the appellate court.by 40four
- Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.by advisedwang
- You're not using "standing" correctly, you're using it more to argue about the merits of the case. Standing is about filtering out frivolous lawsuits. One has "standing" to file a lawsuit when there is reason to believe these three questions could be answered in the affirmative, if a trial were to take place: Was the plaintiff harmed? Did the defendant cause that harm? Can the court rectify that harm?
It's not about what the answers to those questions are. Those are questions about the merits of the case, to be answered at trial. It's about if it should even go to trial.
by jubilanti - Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
by gz5 - Couldn't they just inject Ads into title content if they see headless access? Headless access is kind of inevitable at this pointby krashidov