🍭 Amazon Just Lost Its Anti-Bot Fight ⚖️

Good morning. A federal appeals court just spent 21 pages deciding whether your shopping agent counts as you.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍭 What’s Cookin’:

• Amazon lost its favorite legal weapon against shopping bots

• Microsoft told its own engineers to quit tokenmaxxing

• Rust decided LLMs can review but not write

Amazon vs. Perplexity
⚖️ Agents Won The Case But The War Keeps On

The Bite:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Amazon's preliminary injunction against Perplexity.

The order had barred Perplexity's Comet shopping agent from Amazon's password-protected pages.

The panel held that it is the Comet user, not Perplexity, who accesses Amazon's servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the 1986 anti-hacking law Amazon sued under.

Amazon said it disagrees with the decision and is evaluating next steps.

The underlying lawsuit continues in federal court in San Francisco.

Snacks:

• Circuit Judge Milan Smith wrote the 21-page opinion, joined by two other judges.

• The statute requires intentional unauthorized access plus at least $5,000 in losses across one year.

• Smith wrote that "it is the user who 'accesses' Amazon's computers," with the Assistant carrying out the actions.

• Perplexity argued a Comet user is no more Perplexity than a Safari user is Apple.

• Amazon's brief compared Perplexity to an arsonist blaming the postman for delivering a mail bomb.

• The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla backed Perplexity, while publisher group Digital Content Next backed Amazon.

Why it Bites:

The whole Amazon point is that it wants real users to look at their Ads. Not agents.

Perplexity told the court the real problem out loud:

“…agents don't have eyeballs, and eyeballs are what Amazon sells.”

When an agent takes action for the user, it can mess up retail metrics and conversion rates. But that's a matter of adaptation.

Agents are here to stay. Although, the jury didn't say agents are welcome. It said Perplexity isn't the one knocking. The user is.

The war is not over yet.
The case is still live in San Francisco

The hacking statute was the quickest, cheapest option.
That option is now closed. Everything else Amazon has is slower.

And there is nothing stopping it from rewriting its terms of service, tightening bot detection, or demanding agents identify themselves at the door.

So the fight relocates.

Every retailer with a login wall is now running the same math Amazon is.

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Turn any person, pet, product, or idea into a bold, colorful illustration that looks straight out of a premium editorial or children's book. The prompt focuses on clean composition, punchy colors, and timeless illustration aesthetics.

Use it to:

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Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Classic Vibrant Illustration

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_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

💸 Microsoft Tells Engineers To Stop Tokenmaxxing
→ Executive vice president Jay Parikh set division-level token budget targets and made OpenAI's cheaper GPT-5.6 the default internal model, with guidance noting many engineers spend hundreds to thousands of dollars monthly.

🔧 Rust Adopts An LLM Policy For Its Core Repo
→ Five Rust teams adopted a policy allowing LLMs to answer, analyze, and review but not create, with disclosure required for all public LLM-generated text.

🏛️ Anthropic Names First Global Affairs Chief
→ Anthropic appointed former California Supreme Court justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar on August 4 to run policy and government relations, reporting to president Daniela Amodei.

🛡️ Anaconda Acquires AI Security Startup Enkrypt
→ Anaconda bought the red-teaming and compliance company on August 4, after Enkrypt scans found more than 143,000 vulnerabilities across 73% of 25,000 Model Context Protocol servers.

⚖️ Appeals Court Clears Perplexity's Comet To Shop Amazon
→ The Ninth Circuit overturned Amazon's injunction on August 4, ruling that Comet's users, not Perplexity, access Amazon's servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.