The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has issued a ruling that could reshape the approach to regulating agentic AI in e-commerce. The dispute between retail giant Amazon and AI startup Perplexity over access by an AI assistant to Amazon's website has provisionally ended in favour of the startup.
The backstory: How did an AI assistant go shopping?
In November 2025, Amazon filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI after the company launched an AI browser called Comet, the key feature of which is an optional AI agent (assistant) that performs tasks on behalf of the user. This shopping assistant searches for products on Amazon based on user queries, takes screenshots, and helps with purchasing decisions.
Amazon claimed that such access violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, 1986), which prohibits unauthorised access to protected computer systems. The retailer argued that Perplexity was gaining access to restricted pages of the site without permission.
Moreover, even before Comet's launch, Amazon had expressly warned Perplexity that its products were not permitted on its platform. However, Perplexity ignored this requirement and did not use the special "user-agent string" mechanism that would have identified the AI agent and allowed Amazon simply to block its access.
In March 2026, the district court issued a preliminary injunction blocking Comet's operation on Amazon's website.
The key ruling by the appellate court
On 4 August 2026, the appellate court lifted the injunction and concluded that:
No matter how sophisticated the Assistant may be at this stage, for the purposes of the law, it is a tool, not a person.
Perplexity does not connect directly to Amazon's servers. All traffic passes through the user's browser and device. The AI assistant merely takes screenshots, sends them to Perplexity's servers, and receives navigation instructions. It is the user who accesses Amazon's website with the help of the AI assistant, not Perplexity itself.
Is it possible to protect a website from AI shopping assistants?
AI shopping assistants can use the infrastructure of online stores free of charge through the buyer's browser, since technically the access is performed by the user, not by the AI service itself. To prevent unauthorised access, it is necessary to include prohibitions in the terms of service and to configure technical blocking measures.