Perplexity Believes Amazon is Bullying Them?

My first take: the post is both dramatic and expected for a smaller company looking to leverage a large, established platform for the benefit of their own customers (possibly longer term) and themselves. The lead sentence, "The point of technology is to make life better for people." That sentence alone is well-intended - there is a history of west coast-based tech companies starting with noble goals (i.e., "don't be evil").

I do believe that great user experiences improve the lives of humans. Also, tech founders have generated unprecedented wealth by building platforms that both aid and disintermediate brands from their end customers. The history of litigation is long for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook (Meta), etc. - they invest and build platforms with millions if not billions of users. They want to control the user experience and the economy around their ecosystem. Courts have mostly let them do that.

To be clear, there isn't strong demand from consumers yet to hire or use AI agents to shop for them. (And I hate the anthropomorphism of AI agents like this.) Yes, there will be more ways for consumers to shop. We'll see a disruption in search. We'll see a lot of disruption we haven't yet imagined. I haven't used an agent yet in a new browser that is more convenient than Amazon's one-click or "buy now" - other shopping and checkout processes? Maybe.

Context - on November 4, 2025, Perplexity posted a blog on their website: "Bullying Is Not Innovation."