Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
I used to make Amazon purchases through ChatGPT Agent before Amazon blocked them. I could take a picture of a wrapper and say "buy a new one on Amazon" and it would handle the whole process. Awesome. I actually started shopping at other retailers when Amazon blocked their agent.
One theory I have is that an AI agent can more efficiently price-compare the dozens of different listings of the same item and order the cheapest, cutting into Amazon's margins.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
Because it bypasses their efforts to promote preferred products in the short term and, more importantly, in the long term someone else becoming the front door to purchasing also enables that actor to commodify Amazon the same way Amazon commodifies other sellers, and before long to cut out Amazon as a middleman entirely and become the marketplace where buyers purchase from a diverse array of functionally anonymous, interchangeable sellers.
Private equity was a huge part of why Toys “R” Us died.
More on topic, my personal suspicion would be that AIs get a lot of stuff wrong, unsurprisingly, and so these orders end up with a higher percentages of returns or people claiming they didn’t buy them or other customer service issues.
True, but it's not really existential for them given that most of their profits are actually from AWS. The grocery and dropshipping business has thin margins.
1. When you visit amazon.com looking for a product, even if you are looking for a very specific product, they'll put other products in front of you. You might end up buying one of these other products, and that might make someone more money than if you bought the product you initially planned to buy.
2. You might buy more than you initially intended if you visit the site yourself, via the "Customers Also Bought" links, and other advertising.
3. Agents aren't perfect, and it's possible that they were making ordering mistakes at (much?) higher rates than humans were doing, which was costing Amazon more processing returns or other customer service inquiries.
4. Amazon wants to control the experience of buying a product through them, from start to finish. If they can't do that, they just become a commodity product aggregation site. An agent making purchases for someone can find the same product from another retailer, perhaps with better pricing, faster shipping, a better return policy, etc.
Of course, if other sites allow agents to make purchases, and that eventually becomes the way a significant number of customers want to shop, Amazon will have to get on board.
This is exactly what I saw as the benefit of using ChatGPT to purchase goods. Helping me find healthier options of the same item, or even the cheaper of a x number of brands for that shop.
It means ChatGPT just gives me more of just what I'm asking for rather than giving Amazon the opportunity to push something else on me.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchasess
For the same reasons Amazon intentionally removed their search box's ability to require or exclude terms and target phrases. More efficient, faster searches for YOU reduces their opportunities to shovel more "not what you're looking for right now" in front of your eyeballs to increase impulse sales of adjacent goods.
Simplest possibility: agent-sourced purchases are incorrect and returned at a notably higher rate, perhaps even enough to be unprofitable as a category.
Large retailers rely on all sorts of psychological tricks and UI work to steer you to the most profitable transactions, some of which we have labelled Dark Patterns. Not just Amazon, not just online. All that is gone with agents. At least until they work out how to manipulate the agents as well as a person, most likely by buying control of the the popular agents before their competitors do.
Yup. Retailers sell a ton of popular goods at or below cost to attract customers knowing that they will load their cart with other high-margin items to make up for it. If you remove these upsells and other temptations then the store takes a big hit.
Sure, but that requires work on the part of Amazon to set things up so they can be tricked. That work costs time and money. Amazon may not want to do that work at all. Or they may want to ban agents until after they've done that work.
It would very easily allow someone to undermine their business. If you could shop at Walmart, by walking into Target it would be very easy for Target to say "here is the same item for $0.01 less"
If people find a benefit from using AI to shop on Amazon at scale then there's really no reason to keep Amazon in the loop at all. Especially for products that are high margin.
Amazon's strategy is based more on fast, fairly reliable delivery of an enormous range of products rather than being the cheapest. Whenever I need anything I can be pretty sure that Amazon will have it in stock and deliver it within a couple days. Sure they're occasionally out of stock or they screw up deliveries but Target isn't any better. So it's worth keeping a Prime membership and Amazon remains the default option.
I’m sure it’s for many reasons but I guarantee that one is that they don’t get the ancillary sales. Eg I go to Amazon looking for socks, they have lots of time to show me other things I might buy. Maybe some other customers who bought socks liked these shoes etc.
If an agent can go and buy exactly and only the thing I need that is going to crush those other sales.
This is the correct take. I was at Amazon not long ago and their Ads business is now absolutely massive and growing. Anything that takes away from that is bad news for their growth numbers.
Originally posted this in another thread, but very curious what others think.
Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon?
Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon?
Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon?
Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy?
What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?
Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?
Like, where do we draw the line? In the future, would the only way to shop on Amazon be with approved VR goggles that scan your retina to verify you are a human?
The law has nothing to do with it. Amazon is a private company and can make rules about who can or can't place orders on its website. When you create an account you agree to their ToS.
"autonomous or semi-autonomous" is the key phrase. If you manually invoke a curl command then no, it isn't an agent. If you write code that itself determines when and how to invoke that command then it is.
I don't think GP meant "legal" in the literal sense. Regardless, the post's meaning is still the same if you replace "Is this legal?" with "Does this conform to Amazon's ToS?", so please read it charitably and avoid being pedantic about this sort of thing.
Amazon support family sharing for the same home address - 2 adults and 4 children I think can share the same Prime
My wife and I used to share 1 account, but then I wanted to buy her a gift that had to be a surprise - so had to create a new account and add it as part of the family to the original one…. Then kids grew up and wanted to make small orders themselves, and I didn’t want them to see our order history…
I know its there. But we _prefer_ to have a single account to simplify tracking and picking up packages. I'm curious if from their point of view (or their ToS) I'm even allowed to share my credentials with anyone else.
1Password shared vaults are there for a reason - people share credentials all the time, business or personal.
> Srinivas argued that agents should have “all the same rights and responsibilities” as a real human user. “It’s not Amazon’s job to survey that,” he said.
I am not against people using agents to do shopping although I won’t do that until I see a reliable agent. From the title I thought Amazon might have a point to protect users. But oh no. I should have known better that Amazon must have been cooking their own shopping agents. It’s already hilarious at this point.
Anyway, this excerpt from Perplexity has so many issues. It just looks like an ugly fight.
To me this seems simply anti-competitive. Could Amazon say I cannot make purchaess with a Mac, or Xfinity internet, or a logitech keyboard, or while wearing Levi's jeans? IMO they should have no right to dictate how I make a purchase. Sure, I am not allowed to mass harvest and distribute their data (such as the prices of every item), but for the purposes of making my own best choice I should be allowed to collect datapoints that I could easily and legitimately find on my own .
Let's hope they will still allow me to use Kagi to search for the product I want to buy.
The official Amazon search is so bad and deliberately pushes "promoted" or overly expensive products to the top that I would say it's only a matter of time until someone reverses the enshittification by building a 3rd party Amazon client. And it looks like that's precisely what Perplexity did here: They offer an agent that works for you, not for Amazon. And, predictably, Amazon hates it. It reduces their power to strong-arm brands into purchasing advertisements for their own product names.
> When Perplexity refused to stop its bots, Amazon sought to block them, but Perplexity released a new version of Comet to get around the security measure.
I'm not a lawyer, but the "security measure" wording sounded just slightly odd to me, and I wonder whether it's meaningful, and came from Amazon.
Amazon would certainly be incentivized to try to frame it as a "security measure", as that might increase their chances of a favorable legal outcome if they decided to sue Perplexity.
Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
I used to make Amazon purchases through ChatGPT Agent before Amazon blocked them. I could take a picture of a wrapper and say "buy a new one on Amazon" and it would handle the whole process. Awesome. I actually started shopping at other retailers when Amazon blocked their agent.
One theory I have is that an AI agent can more efficiently price-compare the dozens of different listings of the same item and order the cheapest, cutting into Amazon's margins.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchases?
Because it bypasses their efforts to promote preferred products in the short term and, more importantly, in the long term someone else becoming the front door to purchasing also enables that actor to commodify Amazon the same way Amazon commodifies other sellers, and before long to cut out Amazon as a middleman entirely and become the marketplace where buyers purchase from a diverse array of functionally anonymous, interchangeable sellers.
In short: because they don’t want to become Toys “R” Us.
Private equity was a huge part of why Toys “R” Us died.
More on topic, my personal suspicion would be that AIs get a lot of stuff wrong, unsurprisingly, and so these orders end up with a higher percentages of returns or people claiming they didn’t buy them or other customer service issues.
True, but it's not really existential for them given that most of their profits are actually from AWS. The grocery and dropshipping business has thin margins.
Probably a few things:
1. When you visit amazon.com looking for a product, even if you are looking for a very specific product, they'll put other products in front of you. You might end up buying one of these other products, and that might make someone more money than if you bought the product you initially planned to buy.
2. You might buy more than you initially intended if you visit the site yourself, via the "Customers Also Bought" links, and other advertising.
3. Agents aren't perfect, and it's possible that they were making ordering mistakes at (much?) higher rates than humans were doing, which was costing Amazon more processing returns or other customer service inquiries.
4. Amazon wants to control the experience of buying a product through them, from start to finish. If they can't do that, they just become a commodity product aggregation site. An agent making purchases for someone can find the same product from another retailer, perhaps with better pricing, faster shipping, a better return policy, etc.
Of course, if other sites allow agents to make purchases, and that eventually becomes the way a significant number of customers want to shop, Amazon will have to get on board.
This is exactly what I saw as the benefit of using ChatGPT to purchase goods. Helping me find healthier options of the same item, or even the cheaper of a x number of brands for that shop.
It means ChatGPT just gives me more of just what I'm asking for rather than giving Amazon the opportunity to push something else on me.
> Anyone know why Amazon wants AI agents to stop making purchasess
For the same reasons Amazon intentionally removed their search box's ability to require or exclude terms and target phrases. More efficient, faster searches for YOU reduces their opportunities to shovel more "not what you're looking for right now" in front of your eyeballs to increase impulse sales of adjacent goods.
Simplest possibility: agent-sourced purchases are incorrect and returned at a notably higher rate, perhaps even enough to be unprofitable as a category.
I highly doubt this is widespread enough for them to notice a trend, or if they did, to actually feel like it was a significant amount of revenue.
Doesn't Alexa let you buy stuff? It's probably more to do with the walled garden scenario: use our AI to shop on our platform for our products.
Large retailers rely on all sorts of psychological tricks and UI work to steer you to the most profitable transactions, some of which we have labelled Dark Patterns. Not just Amazon, not just online. All that is gone with agents. At least until they work out how to manipulate the agents as well as a person, most likely by buying control of the the popular agents before their competitors do.
Yup. Retailers sell a ton of popular goods at or below cost to attract customers knowing that they will load their cart with other high-margin items to make up for it. If you remove these upsells and other temptations then the store takes a big hit.
If anything it seems like the agents would be easier to trick (at least right now).
Sure, but that requires work on the part of Amazon to set things up so they can be tricked. That work costs time and money. Amazon may not want to do that work at all. Or they may want to ban agents until after they've done that work.
Most of them, sure. But Agent Smith is cut from a different cloth.
It would very easily allow someone to undermine their business. If you could shop at Walmart, by walking into Target it would be very easy for Target to say "here is the same item for $0.01 less"
If people find a benefit from using AI to shop on Amazon at scale then there's really no reason to keep Amazon in the loop at all. Especially for products that are high margin.
Amazon's strategy is based more on fast, fairly reliable delivery of an enormous range of products rather than being the cheapest. Whenever I need anything I can be pretty sure that Amazon will have it in stock and deliver it within a couple days. Sure they're occasionally out of stock or they screw up deliveries but Target isn't any better. So it's worth keeping a Prime membership and Amazon remains the default option.
I’m sure it’s for many reasons but I guarantee that one is that they don’t get the ancillary sales. Eg I go to Amazon looking for socks, they have lots of time to show me other things I might buy. Maybe some other customers who bought socks liked these shoes etc.
If an agent can go and buy exactly and only the thing I need that is going to crush those other sales.
Because they want users to use their own agent (which obviously will maximize their own profitability).
I’d guess they want to reserve the right to charge LLM vendors to use a proprietary AI purchasing process
Probably because it's taking away from their ads/sponsored business?
This is the correct take. I was at Amazon not long ago and their Ads business is now absolutely massive and growing. Anything that takes away from that is bad news for their growth numbers.
You never want to lose direct contact with your customers. Having someone insert themselves between you and the customer is a recipe for disaster.
Originally posted this in another thread, but very curious what others think.
Can I ask my partner to buy a product on Amazon?
Can I ask my personal assistant to buy a product on Amazon?
Can I hire a contractor to buy products on Amazon?
Can I communicate with a contractor via API to direct them what products to buy?
What if there is no human on the other end and its an LLM?
Same issue with LinkedIn. I know execs who have assistants running their socials. Is this legal?
Like, where do we draw the line? In the future, would the only way to shop on Amazon be with approved VR goggles that scan your retina to verify you are a human?
> where do we draw the line?
Perplexify has shown itself to be a bad actor [1][2][3], and possibly incompetent, too [4].
We need to draw a line, eventually. But it’s far from urgent. And I don’t think Perplexity should be the one deciding.
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/perplexity-ai-loses...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/reddit-sues-to-b...
[4] https://brave.com/blog/comet-prompt-injection/
The law has nothing to do with it. Amazon is a private company and can make rules about who can or can't place orders on its website. When you create an account you agree to their ToS.
Interesting. Amazon ToS actually has a section about agents - https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
And they even provide a definition of what an Agent is:
"Agent” means any software or service that takes autonomous or semi-autonomous action on behalf of, or at the instruction of, any person or entity.
Though to me it raises even more questions. What is a software that takes "autonomous" action on my behalf. Is curl "autonomous"?
"autonomous or semi-autonomous" is the key phrase. If you manually invoke a curl command then no, it isn't an agent. If you write code that itself determines when and how to invoke that command then it is.
> Is curl "autonomous"?
Only when you supply -L
I don't think GP meant "legal" in the literal sense. Regardless, the post's meaning is still the same if you replace "Is this legal?" with "Does this conform to Amazon's ToS?", so please read it charitably and avoid being pedantic about this sort of thing.
Legal matters are all about pedantry.
Can I use Amazon Mechanical Turk to place orders for myself on Amazon?
No.
That is why you have personal credentials to log in to Amazon. If you want to have delegating capabilities you can open an Amazon business account.
Me and my wife share the same Amazon account. Should I open a business account to do grocery shopping?
Amazon support family sharing for the same home address - 2 adults and 4 children I think can share the same Prime
My wife and I used to share 1 account, but then I wanted to buy her a gift that had to be a surprise - so had to create a new account and add it as part of the family to the original one…. Then kids grew up and wanted to make small orders themselves, and I didn’t want them to see our order history…
I know its there. But we _prefer_ to have a single account to simplify tracking and picking up packages. I'm curious if from their point of view (or their ToS) I'm even allowed to share my credentials with anyone else.
1Password shared vaults are there for a reason - people share credentials all the time, business or personal.
She should not. You should create an Amazon family and enroll her as a member.
This way Amazon can keep track of your separate buyer profiles.
Would Amazon be ok with me opening a business account, creating credentials for a Perplexity assistant, and having it buy products?
Based on this article, I'd think not?
Even if it was not AI it would not be allowed. You are effectively creating dummy accounts with bots.
Even the SEC would be against it, as it would inflate the user base of Amazon.
> Srinivas argued that agents should have “all the same rights and responsibilities” as a real human user. “It’s not Amazon’s job to survey that,” he said.
I am not against people using agents to do shopping although I won’t do that until I see a reliable agent. From the title I thought Amazon might have a point to protect users. But oh no. I should have known better that Amazon must have been cooking their own shopping agents. It’s already hilarious at this point.
Anyway, this excerpt from Perplexity has so many issues. It just looks like an ugly fight.
To me this seems simply anti-competitive. Could Amazon say I cannot make purchaess with a Mac, or Xfinity internet, or a logitech keyboard, or while wearing Levi's jeans? IMO they should have no right to dictate how I make a purchase. Sure, I am not allowed to mass harvest and distribute their data (such as the prices of every item), but for the purposes of making my own best choice I should be allowed to collect datapoints that I could easily and legitimately find on my own .
https://archive.ph/nGmOJ
Let's hope they will still allow me to use Kagi to search for the product I want to buy.
The official Amazon search is so bad and deliberately pushes "promoted" or overly expensive products to the top that I would say it's only a matter of time until someone reverses the enshittification by building a 3rd party Amazon client. And it looks like that's precisely what Perplexity did here: They offer an agent that works for you, not for Amazon. And, predictably, Amazon hates it. It reduces their power to strong-arm brands into purchasing advertisements for their own product names.
Searching with site:amazon.com has always been the only useful way to find the thing you actually wanted.
Well, that is if you use a real, functional search engine
Which is your default choice?
Thanks
> When Perplexity refused to stop its bots, Amazon sought to block them, but Perplexity released a new version of Comet to get around the security measure.
I'm not a lawyer, but the "security measure" wording sounded just slightly odd to me, and I wonder whether it's meaningful, and came from Amazon.
Amazon would certainly be incentivized to try to frame it as a "security measure", as that might increase their chances of a favorable legal outcome if they decided to sue Perplexity.
The original source is being discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814846
they didn't seem to care about all the scalping or nvidia cards
Because Amazon has Rufus in beta which they want to push going forward?
Pot has words with kettle.
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