Your Brand is Becoming Invisible: What the Amazon-Perplexity Lawsuit Reveals About Agentic AI

On November 4, 2025, Amazon sued Perplexity, accusing the company of using its Comet AI browser to "covertly" access customer accounts and disguise automated activity as human browsing. Perplexity's pitch: click a button and its AI agent handles your Amazon shopping—no scrolling, no comparison fatigue, no missed deals. The agent searches, evaluates, and buys at the right time for the best price.

This is the first major legal test of how agentic AI will work in practice. The case exposes four problems already reshaping how companies operate, compete, and control customer relationships.

When a Browser Becomes a Trespasser

Amazon's legal team reframes the entire conversation. They're not arguing against technological progress. They're accusing Perplexity of trespassing and accessing private customer accounts without authorization.

The complaint puts it directly: "No different than any other intruder, Perplexity is not allowed to go where it has been expressly told it cannot; that Perplexity's trespass involves code rather than a lockpick makes it no less unlawful."

By calling it trespassing, Amazon turns a discussion about a new tech feature into a legal battle over digital property, consent, and security. Where's the line between a helpful assistant acting on a user's behalf and an unauthorized intruder accessing a protected system?

Every company with a login wall, proprietary data, or terms of service faces this question now. When an AI agent acts with user credentials, who owns the liability for what it does?

The Death of the Storefront

When an AI agent shops on a user's behalf, that user never sees your storefront. All the investment in user experience, branding, and advertising gets bypassed.

This is already happening. Generative AI search engines are reducing click-throughs to websites by providing direct answers and summaries. When an agent makes purchasing decisions, it doesn't care about your branding or marketing campaigns. As Perplexity itself argued in response to Amazon's lawsuit, Amazon is "more interested in serving you ads."

What is a company's choice? They can resist these agents to protect existing revenue streams. Amazon is building its own "Rufus" assistant. Other companies are creating agent-friendly APIs or rethinking business models that don't depend on pageviews.

The question isn't whether AI agents will mediate customer relationships. It's whether you'll have any visibility when they do.

Adapt or Get Bypassed

Agentic AI is changing how companies interact with customers, creating new problems in corporate strategy, workforce planning, security, and ethics. A company's first instinct might be to block these agents to protect its current business model. That's short-sighted.

The better approach: adapt. Rethink how to deliver value in a world mediated by AI. Build agent-friendly interfaces through dedicated APIs. Develop your own AI solutions to own the customer relationship, like Amazon is doing with Rufus. Organizations that learn to harness agentic AI responsibly can turn these governance challenges into competitive advantage.

The agent-driven internet is coming. It won't wait for us to be ready. The question is whether your organization will be a victim of this shift or an architect of its future.

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