Analysis
The Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon's injunction against Perplexity's Comet shopping agent this week, ruling that Amazon is unlikely to succeed on its core legal theory -- that Perplexity itself violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by letting Comet browse and shop on Amazon.com. The panel, in an opinion authored by Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., held that it's the user, not Perplexity, who legally 'accesses' Amazon's servers when using the AI shopping assistant, even though Comet sends screenshots of Amazon pages back to Perplexity's own servers to help complete a requested task.
A Dispute That Started With a Broken Truce
The case traces back to March 2026, when Amazon sued Perplexity alleging Comet had been secretly disguised as an ordinary Chrome browser to quietly re-enable agentic shopping after the two companies had agreed to pause the feature back in 2024. Amazon won a temporary injunction shortly after filing, blocking Comet from shopping on Amazon entirely -- the injunction this ruling now vacates.
The decision doesn't resolve the underlying dispute; Amazon can still seek rehearing or ask the Supreme Court to weigh in, and the core CFAA claim remains alive at the district court. But it's the first meaningful appellate precedent on a question every AI browser and shopping-agent company has been watching closely: whether a decades-old computer-hacking statute, written long before agentic browsing existed, treats an AI agent acting on a user's behalf the same as the user acting directly.
What to watch: whether other retailers facing similar agentic-shopping friction treat this ruling as settled law for their own CFAA theories, or whether Amazon's eventual rehearing petition narrows the precedent before it can be relied on broadly.
