Major US digital publishers have thrown their weight behind Amazon in its legal fight with Perplexity, arguing that AI agents should not be allowed to slip past website safeguards or harvest protected content without permission. The intervention adds further pressure to a case that is rapidly becoming a test of how far autonomous AI tools can go when they interact with password-protected services and commercially valuable publisher material.

According to Press Gazette, Amazon sued Perplexity in November, accusing the start-up of accessing its shopping site and customer accounts without authorisation. A federal judge in California then issued a preliminary injunction in March, temporarily barring Perplexity from using its Comet browser agent on Amazon’s platform, and the company is now appealing. Perplexity says its agents are more transparent and limited than Amazon’s own use of agentic AI on third-party retail sites, while Amazon argues the start-up designed Comet to disguise itself as Google Chrome and pose as a human shopper.

Digital Content Next has now filed an amicus brief backing Amazon, saying publishers must be able to block AI agents deployed by commercial rivals from accessing protected systems and content. The trade body, whose members include the Associated Press, BBC Studios, Bloomberg, Dow Jones, The Financial Times, News Corp, The New York Times and The Washington Post, warned that unrestricted agent access could weaken the economics that fund journalism. It argued that advertisers buy human attention, not machine traffic, and said publishers could be forced into an expensive technical race to detect non-human visitors while losing the ability to measure audiences accurately.

In its filing, DCN also said AI agents that enter through a subscriber’s login could extract, summarise and redistribute material for the benefit of the AI company, while stripping away attribution and eroding direct audience relationships. The group contended that publishers across the board, not just news organisations, have the right to control access to their own content and negotiate a fair price for licensing it. That argument echoes concerns raised by the News/Media Alliance, which has also backed Amazon and said website owners should not be forced to accept third-party systems that have been told not to enter.

The broader dispute reflects a growing clash over agentic AI, with publishers and platforms increasingly worried that automated tools will blur the line between legitimate user activity and covert data extraction. Perplexity has already struck licensing deals with companies including Getty, Gannett, Le Monde, The Independent, the Los Angeles Times and Time, but DCN said those agreements show why forced access is untenable: AI firms, it argued, could otherwise secure the value of publisher content without paying for it.

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Source: Noah Wire Services