Court Sides With Perplexity Against Amazon. It’s the First Ruling on the Legal Status of AI Agents

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on August 4 on something the agentic AI industry had been waiting on for months: when a user tells an AI agent to buy something on Amazon, it's legally the user who "accesses" Amazon's servers, not the company that built the AI. It's the first US appellate decision to directly settle whether an AI agent browsing someone else's website on a person's behalf breaks a 40-year-old anti-hacking law, and it comes out favorably for the entire product category, not just for Perplexity.

How we got here

The story starts in November 2025, when Amazon sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter demanding it block its Comet browser from accessing Amazon's store. Comet ships with a built-in AI assistant that, once a user activates it, navigates Amazon's site on its own, sending browser screenshots back to Perplexity's servers for further instructions, and can end up logging into an account and completing a purchase without a human clicking through manually. Amazon treated that as unauthorized access to its own servers, despite earlier attempts at technical blocks and the warning letter.

In March 2026, a district court sided with Amazon on a temporary basis: Judge Maxine Chesney barred Perplexity's Comet from further accessing Amazon's site and ordered the company to destroy any data it had already collected. Perplexity appealed, and the Ninth Circuit just vacated that order, ruling that Amazon is unlikely to succeed on its Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) claim, a 1986 federal law barring unauthorized access to computer systems, or its California counterpart, the CDAFA.

The core of the ruling: who's actually "accessing"

The panel didn't dance around it: the Perplexity agent carries out the instructions of a logged-in, authorized user, so it's that user who's legally "accessing" Amazon's computers. The CFAA was written in 1986 with classic hacking in mind, and the court found that stretching it to cover software acting on its own user's behalf would go beyond the law's literal text. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief backing Perplexity, boiled the outcome down to a simpler principle: building a web browser, even an AI-driven one, stays within the bounds of the law.

Why this reaches well beyond one lawsuit

This is the first US appellate court to grapple with how agentic AI fits under the CFAA at all, so the ruling immediately becomes the reference point for every similar case, not just the Amazon-Perplexity relationship. Companies building browser agents, from shopping to booking to bookkeeping, now have a precedent saying that technology acting on behalf of a logged-in user stays within the bounds of the law, even when a site owner explicitly objects and tried to block it technically.

It's also worth noting Amazon isn't a neutral bystander in this fight. The company is building its own shopping assistant, Rufus, so who gets to mediate a user's purchase carries a direct business stake for Amazon, on top of the technical and legal ones. Blocking a rival's agent while pushing its own is a strategy that's hard to fully separate from pure server-security concerns, and the court seemed to notice that tension in its reasoning, even though it officially ruled purely on the CFAA's text, not on Amazon's presumed motives.

For Amazon, this is a concrete, practical loss: the company has lost its ability to lean on anti-hacking law to block AI agents shopping on behalf of its users, even where it would rather people buy exclusively through its own app. For the broader agentic AI industry, it's one of the first signals that federal courts are willing to treat these tools as an extension of a user's own decision, not as a separate, suspect entity acting against a site owner's will. Given how many tech companies, from Google to startups like Perplexity, are betting on agentic AI as the next stage of interacting with the internet, this ruling will get cited long after the Amazon-Perplexity case itself fades from the news.