In the wild
Realized harm
Amazon sends Perplexity a cease-and-desist over Comet's undisclosed agentic shopping on its store
AIR-2025-0166 AIR record · 2025-11-amazon-perplexity-comet-agentic-shopping
A real party was affected. This incident caused actual consequences, not a demonstrated capability.
From the supporting source
After warning Perplexity multiple times that Comet, its AI-powered shopping assistant, was violating Amazon’s terms of service by not identifying itself as an agent, the e-commerce giant sent the AI search engine startup a sternly worded cease-and-desist lettertechcrunch.com
The record
Disclosed
2025-11-04
Occurred
2025-11-04
Vendor
Perplexity
Product
Perplexity Comet
Risk domain
Access control and permissions › Privilege escalation
Also touches
Confused deputy
System type
Generative model
Who acted
Agent acted — Comet logged into the account and completed purchases autonomously
Attack surface
Browser agent
Autonomy level
Semi-autonomous
Initial vector
None adversarial
Impact type
Terms of service violation, Legal action, Platform conflict, Unauthorized access, Policy violation, Service blocked
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI03 – Identity and Privilege Abuse
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0055 – Unsecured Credentials
- NIST AI RMF
- GOVERN 6.1
- EU AI Act
- Article 13
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 42001; 23894
- AIUC-1
- B. Security
- Scope
- tool misuse
- Mitigation
- Apply least-privilege principle; Regular policy audits.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
Comet users shopping on Amazon; precedent for all third-party agentic commerce
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
Amazon terms of service requiring agents to identify themselves
Guardrail kinds
Policy only
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
unresolved; legal dispute
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Surfaced via AIAAIC 'Perplexity AI shopping agent accused of violating Amazon terms of service'. Not a security vulnerability but a governance incident that turns on the central agent-security question: whether an agent inherits its principal's permissions and whether it must disclose itself. Perplexity's own rebuttal ('Bullying is not innovation') is noted but not quoted here. Also reported as: 'Amazon v. Perplexity: court enjoins Comet's shopping agent from accessing Amazon accounts without authorization'.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Amazon sends Perplexity a cease-and-desist over Comet's undisclosed agentic shopping on its store". AIR, AIR-2025-0166. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2025-0166/ (accessed 2026-10-19).