Amazon v. Perplexity Heads to the Ninth Circuit Thursday in First Federal Test of Agent-as-Visitor Rights
Update, September 2026: The Ninth Circuit ruled on August 4, 2026, vacating the district court's preliminary injunction and siding with Perplexity. Amazon's request for rehearing by the full court was later denied. The original preview of the June 11 oral arguments follows below, with the outcome and its implications added.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals heard 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. On August 4, 2026, a unanimous panel ruled for Perplexity, holding that it is the user, not Perplexity, who "accesses" Amazon's computers when a Comet agent completes a task on the user's behalf, and that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on either its federal CFAA claim or its California CDAFA claim.
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 had 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 heard June 11, and the panel issued its opinion August 4, 2026, vacating the injunction. Amazon petitioned for rehearing en banc on August 18, arguing the opinion weakens website owners' ability to control which AI agents enter their systems, and the Ninth Circuit later declined to reconsider, leaving the panel's opinion in place.
The Ninth Circuit's Reasoning
The panel characterized Perplexity's Comet Assistant as a "tool, not a person" for statutory purposes: because the user directs the agent, it is the user, not Perplexity, who accesses Amazon's systems. The opinion leaned heavily on the Supreme Court's narrowing interpretation of the CFAA in Van Buren v. United States and the Ninth Circuit's own prior rulings in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn and United States v. Nosal, reasoning that ambiguity in a statute with both civil and criminal applications should cut against liability. The court also rejected Amazon's request for injunctive relief under the CDAFA and found Amazon's claims of irreparable harm relatively weak against the cost of blocking legitimate agent traffic. Because the appeal arose from a preliminary injunction, the panel's findings reflect a likelihood-of-success assessment, not a final merits ruling, and the underlying case returns to the district court.
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, the position the panel ultimately adopted. Their argument: 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, had characterized the district court’s preliminary injunction order as analytically thin on the central Van Buren question, the same gap the Ninth Circuit's opinion ultimately closed in Perplexity's favor.
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. The ruling opens the door for third-party agent traffic (Comet and its successors) to be treated as a routable channel rather than a blockable threat, though Amazon retains other tools, including terms-of-service enforcement, outside the CFAA/CDAFA framework.
The downstream effects reach beyond Amazon. Every retailer, marketplace, booking platform, loyalty program, and SaaS surface that gates content behind a login was watching this case for the same reason.
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.
The EPR Perplexity hub covers the full architecture of the company at the center of the case: the citation economy product design, the Comet browser, the ads pivot, and the founder profile. The Citation Economy Perplexity engineered into the answer interface has now cleared its first federal precedent on the transaction side. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas built those citations into the product as a deliberate commercial choice, and the Comet browser survived its first real legal test as a result of this ruling.
What Comes Next
The Ninth Circuit's holding is the first federal appellate precedent on agent-as-visitor rights, and it will be read closely by every consumer brand with a logged-in storefront, a loyalty program, or a booking flow. Because the ruling addressed only the preliminary-injunction posture, the underlying case returns to the district court for further proceedings, so this is guidance on the law, not a final judgment. Platform operators are already expected to lean more heavily on terms-of-service enforcement and technical detection rather than CFAA/CDAFA claims to manage agent traffic going forward.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team is the staff byline for news, analysis and features on communications, reputation, AI visibility and digital discovery. Everything-PR has published since 2009. AI tools assist with research and drafting, and every article is reviewed by a human editor before publication. Coverage follows the Editorial Policy, and substantive corrections are noted on the article under the Corrections Policy.
