The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the USA lifted a temporary injunction against Perplexity’s AI browser Comet on August 4, 2026. Amazon had accused the company of unlawfully accessing its servers with the AI shopping assistant. The judges instead consider the users themselves as the actors – a central component of Amazon’s lawsuit is likely to fail as a result.
Judges Consider Users as Actors in Amazon Access
The case is named Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc. (Case No. 26-1444). A three-judge panel led by Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. concluded that Amazon is unlikely to prevail in its lawsuit under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the central US federal statute against computer fraud. Comet only accesses Amazon at the direction of the users, the judges argued – legally, the person at the screen is acting, not Perplexity as the software manufacturer. They cited “little to no case law on how AI agents are to be legally classified” and applied the rule known in US law as the Rule of Lenity, which states that ambiguous criminal laws should be interpreted in favor of the accused party. The California statute CDAFA, the state-level counterpart to the CFAA, was also not conclusively examined in the decision. The case now returns to the appropriate district court in San Francisco for further proceedings; Amazon’s trademark and state claims remain unaffected.
Original Ban Dates Back to a March Proceeding
Amazon initially requested Perplexity to cease operations in November 2025 and subsequently filed a lawsuit. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney issued the temporary injunction on March 9, 2026, prohibiting Comet from accessing the Amazon store at all. Amazon justified the request by stating that Perplexity had violated an agreement made in 2024 to temporarily pause agentic shopping on the platform and that Comet disguises itself as a regular Chrome browser to evade bot detection. Comet is an AI-powered browser that autonomously performs tasks such as price comparisons, cart filling, or completing purchases upon request. The case is seen as an early test case for so-called agentic commerce – shopping that is no longer done by humans themselves, but by AI systems acting on their behalf. Following the appellate ruling, Amazon stated that it disagrees with the decision regarding the temporary injunction, believes its position remains promising, and is considering the next steps.
Perplexity Also Faces Regulatory Questions in Europe
The legal dispute with Amazon is not the only one currently concerning Perplexity. The German media authority ZAK classified the company as a content provider in July 2026 and thus revoked its AI search’s previous liability privilege for third-party content. Meanwhile, US courts are struggling to clearly classify AI agents like Comet, as laws such as the CFAA originate from a time without autonomous software assistants. In parallel, German courts have held companies liable for erroneous AI outputs from their chatbots in several cases – a trend that shows how inconsistently judicial systems worldwide are responding to autonomously acting AI systems. The ZAK proceedings were directed against both Perplexity and Google; both companies announced appeals or reviews, while in the USA, the opposite question is now being litigated: not the liability for AI responses, but the liability for AI actions on third-party websites.
It will be crucial whether the narrow interpretation of the CFAA holds in other districts should further platforms sue against agentic shopping tools. Amazon can request a rehearing before the full Ninth Circuit en banc or a review by the Supreme Court, while the actual legal dispute over trademark rights and state claims continues in the district court in San Francisco. It also remains open whether Amazon will now increasingly rely on technical rather than legal countermeasures against AI agents.
