A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday vacated the preliminary injunction that had kept Perplexity’s Comet shopping agent off Amazon.com, holding that under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act it’s the user, not the AI developer, who “accesses” a website when an agent runs in the browser. Per Reuters, it’s the first federal appellate ruling to address whether AI agents acting for users can lawfully reach online platforms, and it drops directly into a body of law that, as the panel itself conceded, has “little to no existing caselaw” on agentic AI.
Writing for the panel, Circuit Judge Milan Smith Jr. framed the question narrowly and answered it plainly. “Our focus is thus to ask whether Perplexity uses a tool (the Assistant) to ‘access’ Amazon’s computers. On the facts before us, we answer no. It is the user who ‘accesses’ Amazon’s computers, with the help of the Assistant to carry out specific acts on Amazon.com.” The Assistant, the 21-page opinion continues, “is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes.” Perplexity’s back-end role, which “may receive screenshots of the user’s browser and may communicate instructions to the Assistant,” doesn’t mean that “Perplexity has ‘accessed’ (gained entry) to Amazon’s servers.”
Judges Eric Tung and John Hinderaker, the latter sitting by designation, joined. The same logic dispatched Amazon’s parallel claim under California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act, where “the focus of the inquiry is still on the person accessing or causing the access.” Amazon’s irreparable-harm and balance-of-equities arguments, Smith wrote, “fall flat.”
The panel also flagged the theory’s downstream problem: treating an AI agent’s traffic as unauthorized access “could expose users themselves to criminal liability.” That’s not a minor aside. It’s the structural point that carries the ruling.
The procedural arc is compressed. Amazon sued Perplexity in November, alleging among other things that Comet disguised itself as a standard Chrome browser to evade detection and pointing to a 2024 agreement in which Perplexity had paused agentic shopping. In March, Senior U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney found “strong evidence” of a CFAA violation and granted the injunction now reversed.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief, called the outcome “a commonsense technical interpretation.” Perplexity chief communications officer Jesse Dwyer said the company “will continue to fight for the right of internet users to choose whatever AI they want.” An Amazon spokesperson was terser: “We respectfully disagree with today’s decision on the preliminary injunction. We remain confident in our case and are evaluating our next steps.”
Amazon retains other potential claims on remand. But the CFAA lane, the same statute that shaped a decade of scraping fights from hiQ onward, has now been read to place the accessor where the intent originates. That’s a doctrinal choice with a long tail: every retailer’s terms-of-service theory against agent traffic now runs into a panel opinion that treats the browser-side model as an instrument of the human holding the mouse.
Sources
- https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/perplexity-overturns-amazon-ban-on-ai-shopping-bot-on-appeal
- https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-08-04/amazon-loses-us-court-ban-on-perplexitys-ai-shopping-tools
- https://www.courthousenews.com/ninth-circuit-lifts-block-on-ai-powered-shopping-assistant/
- https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/appeals-court-agrees-eff-building-web-browser-doesnt-violate-cfaa
- https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-loses-perplexity-comet-ai-shopping-ruling