Amazon Alleges Perplexity Misled Ninth Circuit on Comet Traffic

Amazon says its engineers watched Perplexity's servers hit Amazon's servers every day between 18 March and at least 11 May of this year, according to a 41-page amended complaint filed on 21 September and reported by The Next Web.

The alleged mechanism: Comet for iOS copies a user's Amazon session cookie up to Perplexity's cloud, where 'those servers run a virtual browser and request pages from Amazon directly.' Amazon's line back to the court is blunt: 'No user device touches Amazon's servers.'

That matters because Perplexity told the Ninth Circuit the opposite. In briefs filed on 1 April and 6 May, Perplexity's counsel stated that 'no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer.' Amazon's lawyers wrote on 6 May flagging each statement by page and asking for a correction. Perplexity repeated the statements the same day in its reply brief. On 11 May, Perplexity's counsel wrote back: 'As a measure of good-faith, Perplexity has temporarily disabled the assistant feature on Amazon.com in Comet for iOS.'

Amazon puts numbers on the toll. Comet had run at least 185,712 sessions on Amazon.com by 15 June, and eight members of its traffic engineering team have spent at least 1,280 hours on the agent since July 2025. On identification, Amazon says Comet sends Chrome's user-agent string, echoing a Cloudflare report from August 2025 that Perplexity ran 'an undeclared crawler impersonating Chrome on macOS.'

The pivot is legal, not just factual. The Ninth Circuit ruled on 4 August that the user, not the AI company, is the one accessing Amazon's computers under federal anti-hacking law, and refused rehearing on 10 September. The amended complaint leans on California's computer-data statute and tortious interference instead. It landed the same weekend Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from Amazon.com, one of sixty-nine Amazon-related stories in our tracker over the past ninety days.