Appeals Court Clears Perplexity's Agent to Shop on Amazon

A federal appeals court has handed the makers of AI shopping agents their first real win, and the reasoning behind it may matter more than the result. On August 4 the Ninth Circuit vacated a preliminary injunction that had kept Perplexity's Comet browser away from Amazon's logged-in account pages, according to Courthouse News Service and Search Engine Journal.

The dispute goes back to November 2025, when Amazon sued Perplexity under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Comet can log into a shopper's Amazon account and place orders on that person's behalf. Amazon argued that this amounted to Perplexity accessing its servers without permission, even when the account holder had asked for exactly that. In March a district judge, Maxine Chesney, agreed enough to grant an injunction and wall Comet off from those pages.

Who is the one clicking?

The appeals panel took a different view. Its core finding is almost philosophical: Perplexity does not access Amazon's servers. The user does. Even when Perplexity took a customer's account details and used them to steer the assistant, the court said that fell short of the control needed to pin the visit on the company rather than the person who asked for it.

That distinction is the interesting part. There is, as the panel noted, almost no case law on how to assign responsibility when a piece of software carries out a person's instructions online. The CFAA was written for a world of human hands on keyboards. An agent that reads a page, fills a cart and confirms an order does not fit neatly into it, and the Ninth Circuit chose to treat the human as the actor.

A word of caution on what this is. The ruling lifts an injunction; it does not end the case. Amazon can keep litigating, and the company has made clear it does not want automated shoppers moving through its store uninvited. Courts weighing AI agents have been anything but consistent this year, as a separate fight over an xAI injunction in Minnesota showed.

Still, this is the clearest signal yet on a question every retailer and agent-maker has been circling. If the person owns the account and gives the order, the software visiting on their behalf looks a lot like the person visiting. Plenty of websites were built on the assumption that a visitor is a human with a browser. That assumption is starting to wear thin.