The Ninth Circuit Perplexity Amazon ruling has lifted the preliminary injunction that kept Perplexity’s Comet shopping agent off Amazon’s site. The August 4 decision matters because the panel rejected Amazon’s attempt to treat Perplexity itself as the party that accessed its servers under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA. The court’s distinction is less mystical than the surrounding AI chatter: a user used Amazon, with software acting as the user’s tool.
The dispute is Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI Inc.. Comet is an agentic browser feature that can use a customer’s Amazon account to look at products and begin purchases at the customer’s direction, according to Jones Day’s account of the litigation. Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025, alleging the service entered protected systems without authorization.
Amazon alleged that Comet accessed logged-in, password-protected accounts while failing to identify itself as an AI agent, contrary to Amazon’s terms, and evaded the company’s technical restrictions. Those are Amazon’s allegations, not findings adopted by the appeals court.
Why did the Ninth Circuit side with Perplexity against Amazon?
The panel’s reasoning turned on who did the statutory “accessing.” The relevant CFAA provision applies to a person who intentionally accesses a protected computer. The court said the assistant, regardless of its capabilities, is a tool rather than a person for that purpose, as Techdirt reported from the opinion.
Circuit Judge Milan Smith, writing for the three-judge panel, said the Amazon customer accessed Amazon’s computers with the assistant’s help, according to MediaPost’s report on the decision. Perplexity might receive screenshots from the user’s browser and send instructions to the assistant, but those facts alone did not establish that Perplexity gained entry to Amazon’s servers, the court said.
That conclusion reversed a March preliminary ruling by U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney in the Northern District of California. At that earlier stage, Chesney found strong evidence that Perplexity had violated the CFAA and California’s analogous computer-access law after Amazon sent a cease-and-desist demand, Jones Day reported. Her order barred Perplexity from using agents to access Amazon systems, barred use or creation of Amazon accounts for that purpose, and required destruction of Amazon data obtained by the agents.
Does the ruling make AI agents legal on any website?
No broad safe harbor follows from this ruling. The Ninth Circuit rejected Amazon’s provider-as-accessor CFAA theory at the preliminary-injunction stage. It did not decide that an AI agent, its maker, or its user can disregard a site’s rules or cannot face claims under other facts or statutes.
The unresolved fight is also about control. Amazon’s position was that it could revoke an agent’s access even if an account holder wanted the agent to act. Perplexity argued that a user directing a browser from that user’s own computer does not turn the browser company into the visitor. The panel adopted the latter framing for the CFAA access question before it.
Amazon said it disagreed with the outcome and was weighing next steps, MediaPost reported. Perplexity said it would continue its fight over users’ ability to select AI tools. For platforms and agent builders, the decision supplies an actor map, not a permission slip: user, software tool, and service provider are not automatically the same legal actor.
This story draws on original reporting from Techdirt.
