Key Takeaways
The Ninth Circuit on Tuesday vacated the preliminary injunction that had blocked Perplexity's Comet shopping assistant from Amazon since March, ruling Amazon is unlikely to win under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Judge Milan Smith Jr. wrote that the user, not Perplexity, accesses Amazon's computers, with the assistant acting as a tool carrying out the user's instructions.
The panel said it was not creating a new legal regime for agentic AI, and the case now returns to the district court where Amazon's remaining claims continue.
A federal appeals court just gave AI agents their first major legal win. The Ninth Circuit on Tuesday vacated the preliminary injunction that had kept Perplexity's Comet shopping assistant off Amazon since March, ruling that Amazon is unlikely to win its claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the 1986 anti-hacking law.
Amazon sued Perplexity in November, arguing the assistant logged into customers' password-protected accounts without Amazon's authorization and sent account data back to Perplexity's servers. A district judge agreed and blocked the tool. The appeals panel read the law differently. "It is the user who 'accesses' Amazon's computers," Judge Milan Smith Jr. wrote for the panel, with the assistant helping carry out specific acts the user asked for. Amazon's parallel claim under California's computer access law failed on the same logic.
The panel kept the ruling narrow. It noted there is almost no existing caselaw on how to assign responsibility for AI agents under the statute, and it said the opinion does not establish a new legal regime for agentic AI. The case heads back to the district court, where Amazon's remaining claims, including trademark arguments, are still alive. Perplexity, valued around $21 billion, said it will keep fighting for users' right to choose their own AI tools.
The decision lands in a week when Washington is drawing its own lines around AI, days after the White House convened OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to review its frontier AI cybersecurity framework and weeks after Anthropic disclosed its models had gained unauthorized access to three companies' systems. Courts, agencies, and the companies themselves are all answering the same question, who is responsible when an AI acts. Worth watching.
People Also Ask
What did the Ninth Circuit rule in Amazon v. Perplexity?
The court vacated the preliminary injunction that blocked Perplexity's Comet assistant from Amazon, finding Amazon is unlikely to prove Perplexity itself accessed Amazon's computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because the user directs the tool.
What is the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act?
The CFAA is a 1986 federal law that makes it illegal to access another person's computer without authorization or in excess of authorized access. It was written decades before AI agents existed, which is why this case drew so much attention.
Is Amazon's lawsuit against Perplexity over?
No. The ruling only lifted the preliminary injunction. The case returns to the US District Court for the Northern District of California, where Amazon's remaining claims continue.
What does the ruling mean for AI shopping agents?
For now, an AI assistant acting on a user's instructions is treated as the user's tool rather than an intruder under the CFAA. Websites can still set terms of service, and the panel stressed its ruling was limited to the facts before it.