Perplexity Amazon Ruling: AI Agents Win in Court
3 min readA federal appeals court just handed AI agents their first significant legal win. On August 4, the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction Amazon had won against Perplexity’s Comet browser, ruling that Amazon is unlikely to prove Perplexity itself “accessed” its servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
How the Perplexity Amazon ruling came about
Comet is an agentic browser. You tell it what you want, and it navigates websites and completes tasks on your behalf, including shopping on Amazon. Amazon objected, arguing that an automated shopper operating inside a logged-in customer account amounted to unauthorized access to its systems. It sued under the CFAA, the federal anti-hacking statute written in 1986, and a district court agreed enough to block Comet from Amazon.com.
The question matters because the CFAA was built for intruders breaking into computers, not for software a customer deliberately points at a site they already have permission to use.
What the court actually held
The three-judge panel, in an opinion by Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., drew a sharp technical line. The user’s own browser visits Amazon and captures what it sees. Perplexity’s servers simply receive what the user forwards. On that reading, the customer is the one accessing Amazon, not Perplexity.
The panel also applied the rule of lenity, which construes ambiguity in a criminal statute against liability, and openly acknowledged there is little to no existing caselaw on how to assign responsibility for AI agents. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which backed Perplexity’s position, put the outcome plainly: building a web browser is not hacking. Courthouse News reported the panel lifted the block the same day.
Why the ruling matters
Agentic software is the industry’s current bet, and almost all of it touches third-party sites its makers do not control. Had the injunction stood, any large platform could have treated the CFAA as a switch to shut out a rival’s agent. The decision pushes that fight back toward contract terms, technical blocking, and bot detection, which are slower and weaker tools than a federal hacking claim.
This is a preliminary ruling rather than a final judgment. Amazon can still litigate the merits or lean harder on its terms of service. But agent developers now have something they did not have before: a court saying that a tool a user operates is the user’s action, not the developer’s.
Expect rival platforms to test the boundary quickly, and expect the legal argument to migrate from anti-hacking law toward contracts and access terms. Watch for whether Amazon seeks rehearing.