The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a preliminary injunction on August 4, 2026 that had barred Perplexity’s Comet AI shopping agent from operating on Amazon.com, delivering one of the first appellate rulings anywhere on whether AI agents can legally act on a user’s behalf on a website that doesn’t want them there.
Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025, alleging Comet violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing password-protected customer accounts without authorization, even when a user explicitly directed the agent to do so. A federal judge granted Amazon a preliminary injunction in March 2026, finding “strong evidence” the access was unauthorized. The Ninth Circuit reversed that finding, ruling that under the current record, it is the user — not Perplexity — who accesses Amazon’s computers, with Perplexity’s AI Assistant operating merely as a tool carrying out the user’s own instructions, according to Bloomberg Law’s coverage.
The specific legal distinction the court drew
The panel noted that Perplexity’s Comet browser may send screenshots of Amazon pages a user has already accessed back to its own servers to complete a requested task — but doing so doesn’t itself qualify as unauthorized access to Amazon’s servers under the 1986 statute. That’s a narrow, technical distinction, but it’s the one the entire case turns on: CFAA liability depends on who is doing the “accessing,” and the court found Amazon unlikely to prove that party was Perplexity rather than Perplexity’s own users.
Why the court was careful to limit its own ruling
The Ninth Circuit explicitly stated its decision is limited to the factual record currently before it and does not establish broader legal principles governing agentic AI or liability in other contexts — a deliberate hedge against being read as a sweeping precedent. Still, legal observers have already drawn a direct line to the Ninth Circuit’s 2022 ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, which similarly found that publicly accessible data could be scraped without triggering CFAA liability, suggesting the court is extending a consistent, narrower reading of the decades-old anti-hacking statute to a new generation of AI-driven tools.
What Amazon argued, and what happens now
Amazon had also argued that Perplexity disguised Comet as an ordinary Chrome browser specifically to avoid detection, and pointed to a 2024 agreement in which Perplexity had reportedly agreed to pause agentic shopping activity — details the appellate ruling doesn’t appear to have resolved definitively. The case now returns to the district court for further proceedings, meaning this reversal lifts the injunction but doesn’t end the underlying litigation; Amazon can still attempt to prove its case on a fuller record.
What to watch next
- Whether Amazon pursues further appeal or narrows its litigation strategy given the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning.
- Whether other e-commerce platforms facing similar AI shopping agents cite this ruling in their own enforcement decisions.
- How the case’s eventual full resolution shapes the legal treatment of agentic commerce tools more broadly.
Sources
- Perplexity Overturns Amazon Ban on AI Shopping Bot on Appeal — Bloomberg Law
- Court Lets Perplexity’s AI Agent Shop on Amazon, Overturning a Ban — TheNextWeb
- What the Perplexity vs Amazon Ruling Means for AI Agents Acting on Users’ Behalf — MediaNama
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