The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc. on Thursday, June 11, 2026, in Seattle — the first federal appellate test of whether an AI agent acting on explicit user authorization counts as an authorized visitor to a logged-in commercial website.
The case centers on Perplexity’s Comet browser, which logs into a user’s Amazon account on the user’s behalf and completes purchases. Amazon has argued the conduct violates the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California Penal Code §502 even where the user explicitly directed the agent to act.
Procedural Posture
On March 9, 2026, U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney of the Northern District of California granted Amazon’s motion for a preliminary injunction, finding Amazon likely to succeed on its CFAA and §502 claims. On March 30, the court issued an administrative stay. The Ninth Circuit subsequently paused the injunction pending appeal. Perplexity filed its appellate brief on May 8, calling Amazon’s CFAA theory “a fundamental misfit” for agentic AI operating under explicit user authorization. Oral arguments were calendared for June 11.
Amicus Lineup Splits Along Predictable Lines
The News/Media Alliance filed in support of Amazon on April 29, framing Perplexity’s conduct as misrepresentation of the agent’s identity to gain access to password-protected pages.
The ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia filed in support of Perplexity on April 8, joined by an amicus brief from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and allied digital-rights organizations. Their position: user delegation cannot be denied at a platform’s discretion without breaking the premise of agentic AI on the consumer web.
Legal observers including Eric Goldman, professor at Santa Clara University School of Law, have characterized the district court’s preliminary injunction order as analytically thin on the central question — whether the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Van Buren v. United States narrows the CFAA in ways the district court declined to apply to agentic AI.
Commercial Stakes
Amazon operates the largest e-commerce platform in the United States and runs its own AI shopping assistant, Rufus, which industry estimates credit with approximately $12 billion in incremental annual sales and conversion rates roughly three times the non-AI Amazon baseline. A ruling for Amazon would harden the moat around the largest commerce surface on the open web. A ruling for Perplexity would open the door for every consumer brand to treat third-party agent traffic as a routable channel.
The downstream effects reach beyond Amazon. Every retailer, marketplace, booking platform, loyalty program, and SaaS surface that gates content behind a login is sitting behind the same legal question.
Citation Share Context
Perplexity has been central to the broader shift in AI-mediated discovery. Everything-PR’s First GEO Benchmark reported that the number-one Google result for a brand query shows up inside ChatGPT only 38 percent of the time, and inside Perplexity only 22 percent — meaning the answer engines are already routing buyers around brand-owned surfaces before any agent transaction layer is involved. The 50 websites that most influence whether a brand exists inside the major AI engines, EPR’s research found, rarely include the brand’s own site. EPR has also published a working methodology for how to measure Citation Share across the four engines.
Perplexity itself has been navigating commercial pivots in parallel with the litigation. The company pulled its in-answer ads program in May after fifteen months, citing trust concerns. The same week, the company’s citation economy product features — inline source attribution, ranked references, hover previews — continued to set the visible standard for how answer engines present sources. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas built those citations into the product as a deliberate commercial choice.
What to Watch Thursday
Three threads are likely to dominate the Ninth Circuit panel’s questions: how Van Buren applies to agent traffic operating under explicit user authorization; whether the district court’s reliance on Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures extends from third-party services scraping a platform to AI agents acting on a logged-in user’s direct instruction; and whether the §502 claim survives an as-applied First Amendment challenge raised in the ACLU and Knight Institute brief.
A decision is not expected from the bench. The Ninth Circuit typically issues opinions in CFAA appeals on a multi-month timeline. The interim posture — the administrative stay — leaves Perplexity’s Comet operating on Amazon for the duration.
Whichever way the panel rules, the opinion will set the first federal appellate precedent on agent-as-visitor rights and will be read closely by every consumer brand with a logged-in storefront, a loyalty program, or a booking flow.
Further Reading on Everything-PR
- AI Communications — the pillar
- Amazon: The AI Shopping Layer
- AI Agents Directory — the editorial authority on autonomous agents shipping production work
- AI Agents Booking Flights: How Airlines Win or Lose Citation Share
- Perplexity’s Citation Economy
- Perplexity Blinked: How the First AI Search Engine to Sell Ads Pulled the Plug
- Aravind Srinivas / Perplexity: Building the Citation Economy
- The First GEO Benchmark
- The 50 Websites That Decide Whether a Brand Exists Inside ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity
- How to Measure Citation Share Across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini
- ChatGPT vs Gemini vs Claude vs Perplexity: The 2026 AI Engine Landscape
- What Is GEO? The 2026 Guide
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
