SAN FRANCISCO – A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that Perplexity’s Comet AI shopping agent can continue accessing Amazon’s platform without the e-commerce giant’s permission, dealing a blow to Amazon’s campaign to wall off its marketplace from AI competitors and opening a significant legal corridor for the fast-growing field of agentic commerce.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned an injunction that Amazon had obtained under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 anti-hacking statute that Amazon argued Perplexity violated by having its agent scrape product data and complete purchases on its site. The three-judge panel rejected that framing, ruling that it was users, not Perplexity, who accessed Amazon’s computers, and that Comet simply received screenshots that users’ own browsers captured and forwarded.
“The user’s browser visits Amazon,” the court held. “Perplexity’s servers receive what the user sends.” That architectural distinction, the panel found, put Perplexity’s activity outside the reach of what Congress meant to prohibit when it passed the CFAA.
Perplexity launched Comet earlier this year as a browser-integrated AI agent designed to handle the tedious mechanics of online shopping: comparing prices across retailers, reading reviews, filling out checkout forms, and placing orders on a user’s behalf. Amazon moved quickly to shut it down, filing suit and winning an emergency injunction that blocked Comet from interacting with its site while the case proceeded.
Monday’s ruling lifts that injunction. Comet can now operate on Amazon while the underlying case continues, a procedural posture that, in practice, may matter more than any eventual final judgment. Amazon’s window to establish a legal precedent before agentic shopping agents become deeply embedded in consumer behavior has narrowed considerably.
The decision arrives at an inflection point for agentic commerce, the category of AI tools that execute commercial transactions on users’ behalf rather than simply providing information. PayPal, Google, Apple, and OpenAI have all developed or announced agent systems with purchasing capabilities, and the legal framework governing how those agents interact with websites they were not explicitly invited onto has been largely undefined. The Ninth Circuit just defined it, at least for now, and the definition is favorable to agent builders.
“This is the ruling the whole industry was watching,” said one Silicon Valley attorney who works with AI companies and was not involved in the case. “If the CFAA applied to agents accessing websites, every agentic AI company was one lawsuit away from an injunction.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Perplexity’s legal theory, that its agent merely processes information users choose to share rather than independently accessing sites, has implications beyond the CFAA. It echoes the logic of earlier court battles over web scraping, including the Ninth Circuit’s 2022 ruling in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, which found that publicly accessible data could be scraped without violating the CFAA. Monday’s ruling extends that principle to a more interactive scenario: an AI agent taking actions, not just reading data.
Comet’s architecture is central to why the court reached this conclusion. Unlike earlier bots that sent automated HTTP requests directly to Amazon’s servers, Comet works inside a user’s browser session. The user opens their browser, visits Amazon, and Comet watches, taking screenshots and sending them to Perplexity’s servers for processing. When the agent identifies an item to add to a cart or a checkout form to complete, it sends instructions back to the user’s browser, which carries them out. From Amazon’s servers’ perspective, the entire session looks like an ordinary human user.
That design was deliberate. Perplexity’s engineers built Comet to stay inside the browser session rather than spawn independent server-to-server connections precisely because of legal and ethical concerns about unauthorized access. The Ninth Circuit’s ruling suggests that bet paid off, at least in the CFAA context.
Amazon’s core argument was that Perplexity was using its platform to divert customers toward competing products and away from Amazon’s own Rufus AI shopping assistant, which Amazon launched last year and has been integrating more aggressively into the shopping experience. Rufus can already compare products, answer questions about purchase history, and guide shoppers toward Amazon-branded alternatives. Perplexity’s Comet, by surfacing products from other retailers during an Amazon browsing session, directly undermines that strategy.
The dispute is ultimately less about hacking than about competitive positioning. Amazon built one of the most valuable retail ecosystems in history on the strength of being the default place people started their shopping journeys. AI browsers and shopping agents threaten to insert a new layer between the consumer and the retailer, one controlled by AI companies rather than by Amazon. That is the business threat Amazon went to court to stop.
The ruling does not resolve whether Perplexity’s practices violate Amazon’s terms of service in ways that might support other legal theories, and Amazon retains the option of pursuing the case on those grounds. The company could also seek en banc review, a rehearing by a larger panel of Ninth Circuit judges, or attempt to appeal to the Supreme Court, though neither path would restore the injunction quickly.
For Perplexity, the ruling buys time and legitimacy. The company, which is competing with Google, Microsoft, and a field of well-funded startups for the emerging AI search and agent market, has argued that frictionless access to the web is a prerequisite for building useful AI tools. It now has a circuit court opinion saying, at minimum, that users can authorize their AI agents to act on their behalf on any site they choose to visit. Whether that authorization extends further, into truly autonomous agents that browse without a human in the loop, remains an open question that Monday’s decision left carefully unresolved.
The rise of AI agents conducting a growing share of internet traffic has already prompted major platforms to rethink their terms of service and technical countermeasures. Amazon, Google, and Meta have all strengthened bot-detection systems in the past year. The legal system is now catching up to what the technology has already made possible, and Monday’s ruling suggests it will not always catch up in the way the platform holders prefer.
