9th Circuit reverses Perplexity CFAA injunction in Amazon suit
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a preliminary injunction that had barred Perplexity AI’s agentic browser Comet from operating on Amazon.com, ruling Perplexity is unlikely to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, per Chat GPT Is Eating the World. The panel found that Comet’s Assistant does not access Amazon’s servers on its own — it acts on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers — undercutting Amazon’s theory that Perplexity itself is the unauthorized accessor.
Why it matters: The ruling is an early appellate test of whether agentic AI browsers acting on a user's instructions can be held directly liable under anti-hacking law for touching sites like Amazon without permission, a theory retailers are likely to keep testing as shopping agents spread.
The record: PerplexityAI training & copyright litigation
Via Chat GPT Is Eating the World ↗
Posted to the wire August 4, 2026.