While tech giants could technically replicate Perplexity, their core business models—advertising for Google, e-commerce for Amazon—create a fundamental conflict of interest. An independent player can align purely with the user's best interests, creating a strategic opening that incumbents are structurally unable to fill without cannibalizing their primary revenue streams.

Generative AI primarily changes an app's user interface, but agentic AI can bypass UIs entirely to complete tasks. This makes transaction-fulfillment apps, which constitute a huge portion of the market, vulnerable to being replaced by agents that act directly on a user's behalf.

Perplexity's legal defense against Amazon's lawsuit reframes its AI agent not as a scraper bot, but as a direct extension of the user. By arguing "software is becoming labor," it claims the agent inherits the user's permissions to access websites. This novel legal argument fundamentally challenges the enforceability of current terms of service in the age of AI.

The idea of a truly "open web" was a brief historical moment. Powerful, proprietary "organizing layers" like search engines and app stores inevitably emerge to centralize ecosystems and capture value. Today's AI chatbots are simply the newest form of these organizing layers.

Amazon's potential commerce partnership with OpenAI is fraught with risk. Allowing ChatGPT to become the starting point for product searches threatens Amazon's highly profitable on-site advertising revenue, even if Amazon gains referral traffic. It's a classic battle to avoid being aggregated by another platform.

While AI shopping agents promise to protect consumer privacy by abstracting away direct retailer relationships, this is a false dawn. Power will likely centralize with the major tech companies providing these agents, not empower individual users with decentralized control. The battle for "owning the customer" simply moves to a new layer.

Unlike service platforms like Uber that rely on real-world networks, Amazon's high-margin ad business is existentially threatened by AI agents that bypass sponsored listings. This vulnerability explains its uniquely aggressive legal stance against Perplexity, as it stands to lose a massive, growing revenue stream if users stop interacting directly with its site.

Amazon is suing Perplexity because its AI agent can autonomously log into user accounts and make purchases. This isn't just a legal spat over terms of service; it's the first major corporate conflict over AI agent-driven commerce, foreshadowing a future where brands must contend with non-human customers.

While a commerce partnership with OpenAI seems logical, Amazon is hesitant. They recognize that if consumers start product searches on ChatGPT, it could disintermediate Amazon's on-site search, cannibalizing their high-margin advertising revenue and ceding aggregator power.