I'm not saying this as anti-Amazon or pro-AI (and
certainly not pro-Meta!), but the key difference here is people are
choosing to send proxy shoppers because they can't stand how crappy the store itself is. The closest analogous physical situation would be Walmart refusing to let your aunt pick up some half&half for you.
That said, I'm not really sure why Amazon wants to die on this hill considering it's already been decided by the 9th circuit in
Amazon v. Perplexity 2026. An agent acting on behalf of its user cannot be considered "unauthorized" access under CFAA or CDAFA as long as the user themself had a right to the same content accessed.
Amazon
might be able to spin this into a TOS issue, but that has its own risks - Anyone TOSsed from a platform clearly won't be buying
anything from it, "sponsored" or otherwise. And dissecting that a bit further, the entire question only exists today because we're currently in a grey area between viewing agents as an external resource vs just another tool built into the browser (the latter was the heart of the Perplexity case). Assuming people eventually come to love the bomb, telling our browser to go buy something on Amazon will become technologically indistinguishable from doing it ourselves.