Ninth Circuit lifts Amazon block on Perplexity's Comet AI agent

The Ninth Circuit on Tuesday lifted the injunction that had banned Perplexity's Comet shopping agent from Amazon.com, and the reasoning matters more than the win itself. In an opinion authored by Circuit Judge Milan Smith, the three-judge panel held that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act does not reach a tool like Comet because, as Bloomberg Law reported, it is the user who accesses Amazon's computers with the help of the assistant, not Perplexity itself.

Smith's analogy did the work. He compared a Comet user visiting Amazon from her own machine to a Safari user visiting Amazon from her own machine, writing that the AI agent is no more Perplexity accessing Amazon than the browser is Apple accessing Amazon. The panel also weighed the equities and said an injunction "would impair consumer choice and needlessly limit development of a nascent technology." On the merits, it called Amazon's CFAA theory unlikely to succeed.

The ruling reverses a preliminary injunction issued on March 10, 2026 by Senior U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California, who had sided with Amazon on the 1986 anti-hacking statute and California's computer fraud law. Reporting flagged it as the first time a federal appeals court has addressed whether AI agents acting on behalf of users can legally access online platforms, which is why every general counsel at a large consumer site should be reading the opinion this week rather than skimming the summary.

The honest caveat is that this was an appeal of a preliminary injunction, not a decision on the merits, and Amazon said it "respectfully disagree[s]" and remains confident in its case. The reporting also does not say much about how platforms will respond technically. Expect tighter bot detection, revised terms of service, and, for ad-supported storefronts, a real reckoning with a class of visitors that Perplexity itself argued "don't have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with." For everyone building browser-resident agents, the Ninth Circuit just widened the runway.