Ninth Circuit Lets Perplexity's AI Agent Back Onto Amazon

AI shopping agents just won their first round in a US federal appeals court. The Ninth Circuit in San Francisco has overturned the injunction that barred Perplexity's Comet agent from Amazon, ruling on a premise with consequences far beyond one lawsuit: when an agent shops on your behalf, the party accessing the site is you, not the company that built the agent.

How the case got here

Amazon moved against Perplexity after its Comet browser began letting users order products through an autonomous agent. In March, federal judge Maxine Chesney granted a preliminary injunction, citing strong evidence that Perplexity's tool was reaching into password-protected accounts. That injunction is what the appeals court has now thrown out. The underlying case continues, so this is a reprieve, not a final verdict.

The two positions could hardly be clearer. Amazon argues that third-party AI tools must identify themselves and work through official APIs. Perplexity argues that an agent acting on a user's instructions inherits the user's access rights, full stop.

The reasoning: the user is the visitor

The panel's logic rests on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the US statute governing unauthorized computer access. Since the people running the agent already have every right to log into their own Amazon accounts, the court found the unauthorized-access theory unlikely to succeed. An agent, on this reading, is closer to a browser than to a trespasser.

Why every platform will study this ruling

This is the first ruling from a federal appeals court on whether AI agents may access commercial platforms, which makes it binding precedent for lower courts across the circuit and a reference point everywhere else. The message to platforms is uncomfortable: blocking agent traffic as "bots" gets legally shaky once a real customer's intent sits behind the automation. With ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude all shipping agents that can browse and buy, the rules of agentic commerce are being written in courtrooms first.

If you sell online, treat this as an early warning

A US precedent won't govern every market, but platform policy tends to follow the biggest courtroom, and merchants inherit whatever the platforms decide. Two preparations look sensible now rather than later. Make your product data machine-readable: clean titles, structured data, accurate stock and pricing, because an agent that can't parse your store will simply buy from one it can. And turn your bot policy into a deliberate commercial decision: which automated buyers you welcome, which you block, and how you tell the difference. The merchants who thought about agent traffic before it arrived will be the ones it rewards.

Sources: The Decoder