> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

You never want to lose direct contact with your customers. Having someone insert themselves between you and the customer is a recipe for disaster.

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.

> 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/

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.

Kinda rhymes with that whole "net neutrality" thing, eh?

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

Apple cites "no external payment link" as "security measure".

Sounds familiar?

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.