The U.S.’ Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, this week, overturned an injunction barring Perplexity’s AI shopping agent on Amazon’s ecommerce website. This legal battle was initiated by Amazon in November 2025 against Perplexity. In a legal filing, Amazon had claimed that Perplexity’s Comet browser allowed AI agents to access its platform violating its terms prohibiting automated access to bots.
The Court of Appeals said users of Amazon and not Perplexity used AI agents to enter the platform via the latter’s Comet browser. Basis this, the court saud Amazon’s claim on Perplexity having violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), stands on shaky grounds.
The ruling highlighted that, “To succeed on a claim under the CFAA, a plaintiff must show that the defendant intentionally accessed a computer, without authorization or exceeding authorized access, thereby obtained information from any protected computer, and that there was loss to one or more persons during any one-year period aggregating at least $5,000 in value.”
On the Comet browser, users can use its built-in Comet Assistant to take actions on websites, messaging platforms, and calendars. The browser launched in July 2025 is optimized for e-commerce activities for an agentic experience. It can automate cart management, skip sponsored advertisements, compare product prices on different websites, and log-into user accounts with permission to make purchases like weekly groceries or household utilities.
So far in the case, Perplexity has argued that Amazon is trying to restrict user choice in AI assistants by initiating this case. The AI company has reiterated that Comet acted only after Amazon users gave it premission to use their credentials stored on their own devices.
Source: fingfx.thomsonreuters.com
Earlier in March, a U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney had ruled in favour of a temporary ban on Comet being able to make purchases on Amazon on behalf of humans. At the time, the federal judge had said that Amazon had provided evidence to prove that Perplexity had accessed its Prime accounts despite password protection without Amazon’s approvals.
Perplexity had maintained that its Comet browser only automates what the user instructs, however, the argument was rejected by the court at the time,
The AI company has called Amazon for trying to bully through its legal action — predicting that agentic AI could actually spike traffic on Amazon.
“Amazon announced it does not believe in your right to hire labor, to have an assistant or an employee acting on your behalf. This isn’t a reasonable legal position, it’s a bully tactic to scare disruptive companies like Perplexity out of making life better for people,” Perplexity had said in a blog post back in November last year.
For now, Perplexity’s Comet browser can resume support for AI-powered shopping on Amazon given that the preliminary injunction has been lifted by the Ninth Circuit’s ruling. Amazon has expressed a disagreement with the decision.
The core lawsuit, meanwhile, would now return to the U.S. District Court in San Francisco for full trial proceedings.
The case could become a foundational element to show how courts may approach AI agents in the coming future now that personal virtual assistants are starting to make rapid inroads into day-to-day human tasks.
