Amazon Loses Round to Perplexity: Court Says the User—Not the AI—Is the One Placing the Order

At its core, this legal battle boils down to a highly technical question: when you ask an AI browser to shop for you on Amazon, who's really "logging in" to Amazon's servers?

In November 2025, Amazon sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter demanding it block its AI browser Comet from accessing Amazon's shopping pages. Amazon claimed the two sides had already agreed in 2024 to pause agentic shopping—letting an AI agent autonomously complete the checkout process—but that Perplexity later violated this agreement by disguising Comet's AI bot as a regular Chrome browser to quietly re-enable the feature. In March 2026, Amazon officially filed suit and soon secured a temporary injunction.

But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that injunction on August 4, 2026. According to Bloomberg, the court's opinion found that Amazon's original claim—that Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA)—didn't hold up and wasn't sufficient grounds for an injunction.

To establish a CFAA violation, Amazon needed to prove three things: that Perplexity intentionally accessed a computer system without authorization, that it obtained information from that protected system, and that this caused at least $5,000 in losses over a one-year period. The court reasoned that because Comet only interacts with Amazon when a user actively issues a command, it's the Comet user—not Perplexity—who is actually "accessing" Amazon's servers (the servers that host Amazon.com).

The court's opinion was blunt: issuing an injunction over conduct that may not even violate the CFAA or CDAFA in the first place doesn't serve the public interest. Furthermore, any harm Amazon might suffer from Perplexity offering Comet's shopping feature isn't, by itself, enough to justify an injunction.

Amazon's response to the ruling was relatively measured: "We respectfully disagree with today's ruling on the preliminary injunction. We remain confident in our claims and are evaluating our next steps."

That statement leaves plenty of room to maneuver. The injunction being struck down doesn't mean the case is over—Amazon could seek a rehearing or petition the Supreme Court for review. And even if it does neither, the underlying lawsuit was originally filed in federal court in San Francisco, so the case will simply head back there, giving Amazon another chance to make its case at trial.

For Perplexity, this win puts out the immediate fire threatening to shut down Comet's shopping feature—but the broader fight is far from over.