Ninth Circuit lifts Amazon block on Perplexity's Comet AI agent
TL;DR
- The court ruled Perplexity's AI browser is a tool, not a person under the CFAA, shifting access liability onto users rather than the developer.
- Amazon's trademark and state-law claims against Perplexity survived the ruling, preserving substantial litigation leverage for platforms over agentic access.
- EFF's amicus brief was explicitly cited by the Ninth Circuit as articulating the technical architecture of the system most clearly, a rare outcome for a civil liberties filing.
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.
This ruling covers only the preliminary injunction, not the merits, and Amazon said it "respectfully disagree[s]" and remains confident in its case. Perplexity is still fighting on another front, with Reddit's DMCA scraping case advancing against the company earlier this month. 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.
What others are reporting
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Electronic Frontier Foundation Read →
Court explicitly cited EFF's amicus as articulating the technical architecture most clearly; frames ruling as protection against CFAA weaponization by incumbents.
The Assistant 'is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes.' And, the court concluded, it is a tool operated by users, not Perplexity.
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Knight First Amendment Institute Read →
Amicus framed the case around journalism and research access, arguing CFAA should not chill digital investigative tools; extends the ruling beyond commercial AI agents.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act should not prohibit user-directed activities necessary for research and journalism online.
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Techdirt Read →
Warns the liability shift to users mirrors RIAA's strategy of suing customers during the file-sharing era; Amazon could target individual users with civil CFAA claims.
The CFAA contemplates access by a person. However advanced the Assistant currently is, it is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes.
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TFTC Read →
Extends the ruling's implications to open-source and Bitcoin developers; flags Amazon's surviving trademark claims and Congressional CFAA revision as remaining threats.
Developers like Perplexity facilitate that access by creating tools that enable users to meaningfully engage with the web.
Originally reported by bloomberglaw.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Ninth Circuit Overturns Perplexity Ban on Amazon, First Appeals Ruling on AI Agent Access