A federal appeals court has handed Perplexity a significant win in one of the first major legal tests of AI agents acting on users’ behalf. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a preliminary injunction that had barred Perplexity’s Comet browser from operating its AI shopping assistant on Amazon, ruling that Amazon is unlikely to succeed on its claim that Perplexity violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
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The Core Legal Question
Comet is an agentic AI browser that can navigate websites, log into accounts, and complete purchases on a user’s instructions. Amazon sued in November 2025, arguing that Perplexity itself was improperly accessing its computer systems without authorization. A district court agreed in March, granting Amazon a preliminary injunction — but the Ninth Circuit has now reversed course.
Users, Not Software, Are Doing the Accessing
A three-judge panel found that, on the current record, it is Amazon’s users — not Perplexity — who access the platform through Comet. The court characterized the AI assistant as a tool carrying out a user’s own instructions rather than an independent actor breaching Amazon’s systems, a distinction that matters enormously under the CFAA, which criminalizes unauthorized access rather than the use of automation tools generally.
Why This Ruling Reaches Beyond One Company
The decision is among the first appellate rulings anywhere to address whether AI agents can legally interact with websites on a user’s behalf without the site owner’s explicit permission. As a wave of shopping, booking, and research agents move from demos into daily use, platforms from airlines to retailers have been weighing whether — and how — to block or throttle bot-like traffic from AI browsers. This ruling suggests that at least within the Ninth Circuit, courts may be reluctant to treat agentic browsing as inherently unauthorized.
What Comes Next
The case now returns to the lower court for further proceedings, and Amazon could still pursue other legal theories or seek further appellate review. But for now, Comet is free to resume shopping on Amazon, and the ruling gives other AI agent developers a meaningful, if not final, precedent to point to as they push further into commerce, travel, and other permission-sensitive corners of the web.
