A US federal appeals court has declined to keep a ban on Perplexity’s AI shopping tools in place, in the first appellate ruling to ask whether AI agents may legally act for users inside online platforms.
Perplexity’s tools let shoppers delegate the entire browse-and-buy loop to an agent, compressing the discovery journey that marketplaces were built to host.
The ruling lands at the frontier of e-commerce law, where the shopping assistant and the platform are fighting over who owns the customer relationship.
Amazon had sought to bar the AI startup’s tools from its site, arguing they scrape and transact in ways that violate the marketplace’s terms.
For fashion retail, the stakes are structural: if agents can shop on a user’s behalf, the storefront becomes a back-end rather than a destination.
