Amazon vs Perplexity Ruling: AI Agents Can Shop, for Now

A US federal appeals court just handed AI shopping agents their biggest legal win. On August 4, the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction that had barred Comet’s assistant from shopping on Amazon.com since March, ruling 3-0 that when an AI agent shops with a user’s own login, it is the user — not the AI company — who “accesses” the site under US anti-hacking law. The underlying lawsuit continues, and Amazon told Reuters it is “evaluating our next steps”. Here is what the court said, who still blocks agents, and why it lands differently in India.

What the Ninth Circuit actually decided

The panel — Judges Milan Smith (writing), Eric Tung and John Hinderaker — held that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on its Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims, the 1986 anti-hacking statute known as the CFAA, or on California’s parallel computer-fraud law. The reasoning is the quotable part: “however advanced the Assistant currently is, it is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes.” In the panel’s framing, “it is the user who ‘accesses’ Amazon’s computers, with the help of the Assistant to carry out specific acts on Amazon.com.”

Because the CFAA is also a criminal statute, the court applied the rule of lenity — ambiguous criminal laws get read narrowly — adding that “it is unlikely that Congress would have exposed individual users to criminal liability” for using a browsing tool. It also found Amazon’s claimed harms too abstract to justify an injunction, and warned that one “would impair consumer choice and needlessly limit development of a nascent technology,” as MediaPost reported.

Two limits matter as much as the headline. The panel wrote, “We do not establish a new legal regime governing agentic AI,” and stressed the ruling does not stop Amazon from policing access through its terms of service — contract claims, unlike hacking claims, remain fully open. And the case heads back to Judge Maxine Chesney’s San Francisco courtroom, where Amazon’s suit is very much alive. Reuters called it the first US appeals-court ruling on whether AI agents may access online platforms on a user’s behalf.

How the fight got here

The dispute has escalated for a year, per TechCrunch’s coverage of Amazon’s first legal threats. Amazon’s core objection was never AI shopping itself: Comet allegedly presented itself to Amazon’s servers as ordinary Chrome traffic rather than identifying itself as an automated agent.

Perplexity’s November manifesto argued a user agent “has exactly the same permissions you have, works only at your specific request, and acts solely on your behalf” — platforms, it said, have no more right to ban AI assistants than wrenches. Amazon countered in a written filing to the court that Perplexity “can no more disclaim access than an arsonist could say, ‘I didn’t send that mail bomb, the postman did,’” per MediaPost’s account.

The fight drew heavyweight seconds. The EFF, ACLU, Mozilla and the Knight First Amendment Institute backed Perplexity in a joint amicus brief, warning a broad CFAA reading would criminalize everyday tools used by journalists and researchers. On Amazon’s side, the News/Media Alliance and a publisher coalition representing outlets with 259 million combined unique visitors argued that agents impersonating humans gut a site’s control of its own platform.

Why “a tool, not a person” matters beyond Amazon

US courts had already ruled, in hiQ v. LinkedIn, that scraping publicly accessible pages does not violate the CFAA. But logged-in accounts were different territory: under Facebook v. Power Ventures, a platform could revoke a third party’s access even when users handed over their own credentials — the precedent Judge Chesney leaned on when she granted the injunction.

The appeals panel threaded those precedents rather than overruling either: an AI assistant driving the user’s own browser session sits on the user’s side of the line, so the “access” belongs to the user. That reasoning weakens the main statutory weapon platforms had against unwanted agents — which is why it echoes from eBay’s agent ban to airline ticketing (Airlines for America filed as an amicus, per the opinion’s own list). Platforms can still write agent bans into their terms and sue for breach of contract; what they largely lost is the ability to call user-directed agents “hacking.”

The scoreboard: who blocks agents, who courts them

The ruling lands in a market already choosing sides, one we last mapped when an autonomous agent breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure. The stakes are measurable: Adobe, tracking over a trillion US retail-site visits, found AI-referred retail traffic up 138% year over year as of May 2026, converting 54% better than non-AI traffic, and McKinsey forecasts $3-5 trillion in global agentic-commerce revenue by 2030, about $1 trillion of it in the US.

Amazon, notably, is not anti-agent — it is anti-other people’s agents. It has expanded Buy for Me, which lets its own AI purchase from other retailers’ sites, while suing to keep Perplexity’s agent off Amazon.com. That asymmetry shows where market power sits — and contract-based enforcement, the path the court left open, favors platforms too big to ignore.

The India angle

India is Perplexity’s largest market by monthly active users — 3.7 million as of mid-2025, up 640% year over year per Sensor Tower data reported by TechCrunch — thanks largely to the Airtel deal that gave 360 million customers a free year of Perplexity Pro, a bundle worth ₹17,000 per user. The offer closed to new signups on January 17, 2026, though earlier activations run their full year. The same TechCrunch report calls Perplexity’s India revenue negligible — reach first, monetization later.

So the company that just won the right to shop on Amazon.com has its biggest audience where that right means little yet. Comet launched in India in September 2025, but no report we could find verifies its shopping assistant completing purchases on Amazon.in or Flipkart — and the ruling interprets a US statute, settling nothing under Indian law, where the IT Act’s unauthorized-access provisions have no reported case on user-directed AI agents at all.

The sharper India story is payments. NPCI, which runs UPI, has piloted agentic payments with OpenAI and Razorpay since October 2025 and with Anthropic’s Claude since February, capped at ₹15,000 per delegation. A proposed Unified Agent Protocol to let vetted agents transact on UPI awaits RBI approval, while the RBI’s authentication rules effective April 2026 still assume a human approving every payment. Perplexity — India’s largest AI app by MAU and winner of the marquee agent-access case — appears in none of the reported NPCI pilots; OpenAI, Google and Anthropic all do. India is building agent rails through its payments regulator rather than its courts — closer to the EU’s rulebook model we covered when the AI Act’s next phase kicked in than to American litigation.

Amazon has put $40 billion into India since 2010 and pledged $35 billion more through 2030, counts 1.7 million marketplace sellers, and its assistant Rufus has run on Amazon.in since November 2024 — if agentic shopping reaches Indian consumers, incumbents can supply it themselves.

What to watch

Amazon’s “evaluating our next steps” leaves three paths: rehearing en banc, the Supreme Court, or fighting on at trial around the contract theory the panel preserved. Also watch Amazon’s broader agent block list — Perplexity is not the only agent fenced out.

In Washington, a discussion draft of the AI AGENT Act circulated in late June would force large platforms to give third-party agents nondiscriminatory access — settling by statute what this case is settling by inches. In India, the RBI’s verdict on NPCI’s agent protocol is the date that matters. Across our Big Tech coverage, the trend to track is cost: since OpenAI’s 80% price cut on GPT-5.6 Luna, capable agents keep getting cheaper — more agents at more platform doors, and for now an appellate ruling says the door cannot be slammed by calling the knock a hack.

Nothing here is legal or financial advice; the underlying lawsuit continues and facts may evolve.