The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a ruling that had temporarily barred Perplexity from using its AI-powered agentic shopping tools on Amazon's platform, delivering the first federal appeals court decision on whether AI agents acting for users can legally access online services. The San Francisco-based appeals court found Amazon unlikely to succeed on its claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated federal computer-hacking law.
The dispute centers on Perplexity's Comet browser, whose AI assistant can log into users' online shopping accounts and place orders on their behalf. Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025, accusing the startup of covertly accessing private customer accounts and alleging breaches of both the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.
A federal judge in California granted a temporary injunction in March 2026 after finding Amazon presented "strong evidence" the AI agent broke U.S. computer fraud law.
The three-judge panel disagreed, ruling that Perplexity's users were the ones who "accessed" Amazon's platform under the law, not Perplexity itself. Because Comet requires user direction to operate on Amazon, the court determined the AI assistant functions as a tool acting on the user's instructions rather than an independent intruder.
The same reasoning applied to Amazon's California law claim.
Perplexity had dismissed the lawsuit as a "bald attempt" to block users from Comet, arguing that AI agents "don't have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with." Amazon, for its part, claimed the companies had agreed to pause agentic shopping in 2024 before Perplexity re-enabled the feature by disguising Comet's bot as a normal Chrome browser.
The ruling vacates the injunction but doesn't close the case. The underlying lawsuit continues in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where the case was sent back for further proceedings consistent with the appeals court decision.
Amazon said it remains confident and is weighing options including seeking a rehearing or asking the Supreme Court.
The decision carries weight beyond this dispute, marking the first appellate ruling on whether agentic AI tools that browse, shop, and transact across the web can legally access online platforms. That question has broad implications for the fast-growing field of AI agents that operate with limited human oversight, though the court's reasoning was specific: a tool doing a user's bidding doesn't fit the definition of unauthorized access under a statute written for a different kind of intrusion.
