A federal appeals court just ruled that when you send an AI agent to shop for you, you're the one accessing the site, not the company that built the bot. That single distinction just reopened Amazon to Perplexity's Comet.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a preliminary injunction this week. It had barred Perplexity's Comet browser from shopping on Amazon.com. In a 21-page opinion, a three-judge panel found that Comet's users, not Perplexity itself, are the ones who "access" Amazon's computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act when they let the AI agent browse, add items to a cart, and check out on their behalf. That's a full reversal of what a federal district judge in the Northern District of California ruled earlier this year, when the court found Amazon likely to win its case and blocked Comet from logged-in Amazon pages.
Amazon sued Perplexity late last year. It argued that Comet was breaking a 1986 anti-hacking law by logging into customer accounts and completing purchases without Amazon's authorization, even after Amazon tried to technically block the tool and sent a cease-and-desist letter. The company's core argument was that Comet never disclosed it was an AI agent acting for a human shopper, and that Amazon never consented to let it in. The district court bought that theory. The Ninth Circuit didn't.
The panel's reasoning turned on a narrow but consequential question: who is actually doing the "accessing" when a person tells software to act for them? The court's answer was the person, not the software. Blocking Comet, the panel found, would limit consumer choice and slow the development of a still-new category of technology. That knocks out the foundation of Amazon's CFAA claim, and its California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act claim alongside it.
Amazon isn't backing down quietly. The company said it disagrees with the ruling, remains confident in its underlying case, and is weighing its next steps. It hasn't said which. That could mean an appeal to the full Ninth Circuit, a push back at the district court on the merits, or a shift toward Congress and state legislatures, where several lawmakers have floated rules specifically aimed at agentic bots. Amazon has more clout there than it does in court: it's a much bigger political donor and lobbying presence than a five-year-old AI startup.
Every agentic browser was watching #
This is the first time a federal appeals court has weighed in on whether AI agents can legally browse, shop, and transact on someone else's platform without that platform's blessing. Every company racing to build an agentic browser was watching. This case was the test. OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas and Google's various Gemini agentic surfaces face the same basic legal exposure. Comet just cleared it. They act on a platform they don't operate, using credentials the user hands over. If Amazon had won outright, any e-commerce site could have cited this case to argue that letting a bot use your login is itself the crime.
OpenAI has taken a narrower route. Its Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe, sticks to the checkout layer and powers Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT, but only for merchants who opt in. Perplexity's approach with Comet is more aggressive: it goes wherever the user is already logged in, opted-in merchant or not. That's what made Amazon nervous, and it's exactly what the Ninth Circuit just said the law doesn't stop.
What happens next #
None of this means platforms are out of options. The ruling addressed the CFAA and its California counterpart, not contract law. Amazon's terms of service still bar automated access, and a breach-of-contract claim is a very different fight than a hacking statute claim, one Amazon didn't lean on as hard the first time around. Expect that to change. Other retailers watching this case now have a clearer playbook: technical blocks and takedown demands won't carry a CFAA claim on their own. The next round of platform-versus-agent lawsuits will likely be fought over what a sign-in agreement actually permits, not whether logging in with permission counts as a crime.
Comet is shopping on Amazon again as of this week. Whether it stays that way depends less on judges now, and more on what Amazon's lawyers, and Congress, decide to do next.
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