Ninth Circuit Vacates Amazon's Injunction Against Perplexity's Comet Shopping Agent

The Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon’s preliminary injunction against Perplexity’s Comet browser on August 4, 2026, clearing the AI shopping agent to act on users’ logged-in Amazon accounts again. The panel’s core holding: it’s the user, not Perplexity, who “accesses” Amazon’s servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, even when Comet’s Assistant retrieves screenshots of account pages to complete a task the user requested.

The case traces back to March 9, 2026, when U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney granted Amazon’s request for a preliminary injunction, blocking Comet from touching logged-in Amazon account pages. The Ninth Circuit stayed that order pending appeal, heard oral arguments in Seattle on June 11, and has now vacated the injunction outright roughly seven weeks later.

The court’s reasoning leaned on the rule of lenity — construing statutory ambiguity against liability when a criminal statute like the CFAA is unclear. It explicitly framed Comet’s Assistant as “a tool, not a person for statutory purposes,” rejecting Amazon’s argument that Perplexity’s software itself was the unauthorized accessor. The opinion is careful to flag how thin the legal ground is here: the panel wrote there is “little to no existing caselaw directly dealing with how to ascribe responsibility for AI agents” under the CFAA, and said its holding is narrow — agentic AI law “will doubtless change” as more cases work through the courts.

Amazon isn’t out of options. Its trademark claims and state-law claims against Perplexity survive the ruling and continue in the lower court. But the CFAA claim — the one carrying the injunctive weight that actually kept Comet off Amazon’s site — is gone for now.

This matters well beyond Perplexity and Amazon. Every company building an agentic browser or shopping assistant that logs into third-party sites on a user’s behalf has been operating under legal uncertainty about whether that constitutes “unauthorized access” to the site being visited. The Ninth Circuit’s answer — that the human who initiated the session is the one accessing the server, not the software carrying out their instructions — gives agent builders a real precedent to point to, at least within the circuit. EFF, which filed in support of Perplexity’s position, called it a win for the principle that building a browser with AI features doesn’t inherently violate the CFAA.

Expect Amazon to keep fighting this on other fronts — trademark and state contract-law theories don’t require proving CFAA-style “access,” and platform operators generally have more direct tools, like rate-limiting, bot detection, and terms-of-service enforcement, to push back on agents crawling their logged-in surfaces even without a CFAA claim in hand.

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