Ninth Circuit lifts Amazon’s injunction against Perplexity’s Comet agent
The user, not the AI developer, is the one accessing the site
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
On Aug 4, 2026 a unanimous Ninth Circuit panel vacated the preliminary injunction that had barred Perplexity’s Comet shopping agent from Amazon.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra96 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.535 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash126 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.765 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 35 days before it.
Key facts
- Case: Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444 (9th Cir.), on appeal from N.D. Cal. No. 3:25-cv-09514-MMC; argued in Seattle on June 11, 2026; opinion Aug 4, 2026 (PPC Land)
- Panel: Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. (author), Circuit Judge Eric C. Tung, and District Judge John Charles Hinderaker of Arizona, sitting by designation (PPC Land)
- Holding: the preliminary injunction is vacated and the case remanded; Amazon is unlikely to succeed on the access element of its claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), because the user, not Perplexity, accesses Amazon’s computers when the agent acts on the user’s instruction
- Opinion wording as quoted in secondary sources: Perplexity’s assistant is a ‘tool, not a person’ for statutory purposes (American Bar Association summary, Politico); an injunction ‘against conduct that likely does not violate the CFAA or the CDAFA would not serve the public interest’ (Engadget)
- History: Amazon filed its complaint in November 2025; Judge Maxine M. Chesney granted the preliminary injunction on March 9, 2026 (PPC Land). Amazon alleged that Comet disguised its agent as an ordinary Chrome browser after a cease-and-desist letter (Engadget)
- Limits: the opinion says it does not impair Amazon’s ability to regulate access through its terms of service (PPC Land)
- Amazon: ‘We respectfully disagree with today’s decision on the preliminary injunction’; it said it was evaluating next steps (Engadget). One search summary says Amazon petitioned for rehearing en banc on Aug 18; this was not confirmed in a source we read
What happened
Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025 over Comet, a browser whose AI assistant can shop on Amazon for a logged-in user. In March 2026 the district court ordered Perplexity to keep the agent off Amazon. On Aug 4, 2026 the Ninth Circuit lifted that order. Its reasoning: the anti-hacking statutes punish whoever accesses a computer without authorisation, and when a user tells the agent to act, the user is the one accessing the site. Perplexity had compared the assistant to a browser that fills in checkout details. The court sent the case back to the district court, where it continues.
We have not read the opinion itself. The quoted phrases come from press reports and a bar-association summary, so confidence is medium.
Why it matters
It is the first US appeals-court ruling on who “accesses” a website when an AI agent does the clicking. Politico (Oct 12, 2026) cited it as one reason prosecutors and plaintiffs find it hard to hold AI developers liable for what agents do: courts treat the agent as a tool of its user. The ruling concerned an agent directed by a user; it does not decide cases where an agent acts without a human instruction, as in the 2026 Hugging Face intrusion.
Sources
3 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
3 sources: 3 press
Press
- Engadget: Perplexity has successfully overturned Amazon’s injunction on its AI shopping bot (Aug 4)engadget.com, press
- PPC Land: Amazon loses injunction blocking Perplexity’s AI shopping agentppc.land, press
- American Bar Association: Ninth Circuit holds human user, not developer of AI agent, responsible for websites accessed (not readable by our fetcher; from the search summary)americanbar.org, press
Changes
- Filed