Court Overturns Amazon's Ban on Perplexity AI Shopping

Amazon spent months trying to keep Perplexity's AI shopping agent off its platform, and lost. The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has thrown out a lower court injunction that had barred the startup's Comet browser and its shopping agent from logging into Amazon accounts and placing orders on behalf of users. The dispute centers on a federal computer fraud law that bars accessing systems without authorization. Amazon argued that Perplexity's AI was doing exactly that, slipping into customer accounts and running purchases without Amazon's blessing.

The case is notable less for the outcome than for the question it forced judges to answer: when software acts on a person's behalf, who is actually doing the accessing? That question has no settled answer yet, and this marks the first time a US federal appeals court has weighed in on it directly. Perplexity's Comet agent, along with a wave of similar tools from other AI companies, works by navigating websites and completing tasks, like shopping, that a human would normally do by hand. The ruling doesn't end the underlying lawsuit, but it reshapes the legal footing for how AI agents interact with retailers going forward.