Who WOULDN’T want to give their credit card and bank account info to AI, and tell it to just go shopping for them . . . ?

Photo above - Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, who is also India's youngest billionaire.

Amazon is suing Comet. Not the mysterious comet hiding behind the sun, which Harvard Professor Avi Loeb claims is a spaceship. (In fact, Professor Loeb made this claim about at least 4 other comets and asteroids). Amazon is suing “comet the shopping bot”. (see link below).

Yeah, I’ve never heard of this shopping bot either. It’s a startup. And apparently users are handing over their credit card numbers, debit cards, bank info etc. and giving it permission to go shopping on their behalf.

What could go wrong?

A more detailed explanation might be provided forthcoming from the People’s Army Hacking Brigade Army division in China, but my concise overview is: your account data could be stolen, and you could be impoverished. Or possibly Comet the shopping bot could get confused and order thousands of dollars of stuff you don’t need or want.

Take my personal experience. I ordered a toilet plunger for $13.74 from Amazon this morning. Then found my missing plunger, and cancelled the order 30 minutes later. Amazon’s own bot says it has received both my requests, and will let me know what happens next. I’m not sure telling Comet the shopping robot to scour the entire world wide web with my Visa account number to find “the best deal on 5 star rated toilet plungers” would have put me in a safer place.

Comet the shopping robot is the brainchild of a company called “Perplexity”. Stop laughing . . . I am not making this name up. Perplexity was founded 2 years ago by a couple of guys named Johnny Ho and Aravind Srinivas. They claim their company is worth $20 billion, but since Perplexity is brand new and not listed on any stock exchange that number could be imaginary.

In addition to the Amazon lawsuit, Perplexity was also being sued by The New York Times, BBC, Dow Jones, and other big names for unleashing “undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of websites”. (Exact quote)

So everyone’s trust and confidence in Comet the shopping bot should be high. If they’ve already been sued by so many companies, certainly they’ve learned something from this, and will now handle your bank info securely and discretely, right?

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Amazon Sues to Stop Perplexity From Using AI Tool to Buy Stuff

Perplexity AI - Wikipedia