Amazon sends legal threats to Perplexity over agentic browsing

Discussion (72 points, 5 hours ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45814461

This is morphing definition of intellectual property rights in age of agents & chat bots in western world, public should not be calm about this, if ai scrapes all indie blogs of authors, chefs, journalists and even major news outlets, won’t it leave those human endeavors (creative or not, we can all agree it’s unique & done by humans with good economic incentives) vulnerable to stagnation and people forgetting that side of internet & going back to passively consuming it instead of participating in it because of lack of economic or even sociological incentive (if people summarize or loose attention anyway, why think or write of any nuance in politics, law, even fiction books, recipes etc., it becomes evolutionarily costly for humans to do this gradually)

> Perplexity’s argument is that, since its agent is acting on behalf of a human user’s direction, the agent automatically has the “same permissions” as the human user. The implication is that it doesn’t have to identify itself as an agent.

Prudent or not, self serving or not, amazon is right to argue its access controls be strict and that it as owner of website should control it with industry wide accepted rules of engagement, this argument from perplexity is a bad one, human or not while browsing web is a low bar already, captcha etc. were easily circumvented even before ai agents, now if we argue agents are human adjacent, it is a direct case for removing humans of any agency (largely philosophically speaking) and not to mention, imagine the horror show of scams & ransomware it unleashes on millions of users (even engineers can’t recognize or stop them today, prompt injection etc)

This argument that websites controlling their access to bots & agents is a good idea. It should be the way it is, for businesses (amazon or not) and for internet blogs and open web associated sites, if they choose to exclude themselves from upcoming lovely silicon valley stories of ai utopias, they should be able to do so. No one should force them to ‘get with the program’.

In my opinion the whole agents.txt thing is bullshit and/or politeness, and should have zero legal significance.

If something is openly available on the internet you should be able to crawl it, and it is the server's responsibility to identify, authenticate and/or ban clients that do not adhere to it's requirements. If Amazon states "You must not use agents" in it's website terms of service then it would be the individual perplexity user not perplexity itself that is breaking it's terms of service, since they are the one operating the agent.

All in all lame move by Amazon.

> This is Amazon’s first legal salvo against an AI company, and it is a threat to all internet users

well, it's no threat to me as I'd rather not use the internet than have some dogshit "AI" agent browsing for me

> Publishers and corporations have no right to discriminate against users based on which AI they've chosen to represent them.

of course they do, "AI" agents are not a protected class

if I want to ban e.g. all Mac OS users from my store I can do that too

> Perplexity is fighting for the rights of users.

what a load of utter toss