The winner here is anyone building browser-based AI agents; the payer is Amazon’s litigation strategy against them. The Ninth Circuit has held that Perplexity is unlikely to face liability under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for its Comet browser’s shopping-assistant feature, because it is users — not Perplexity — who “access” Amazon’s servers when the tool browses on their behalf. That distinction matters enormously to a market full of agentic browsers, shopping copilots, and scraping-adjacent tools whose entire business model depends on acting as an intermediary between a user and a website the user is already entitled to visit.
The dispute traces back to a complaint Amazon filed in November 2025 in the Northern District of California, which won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity on March 9, 2026, according to IAPP. That early win for Amazon signaled platforms could lean on the CFAA to slow agentic AI rollouts the same way LinkedIn once tried to use it against scraping firm hiQ Labs. The Ninth Circuit’s 2019 hiQ ruling — that scraping publicly available data isn’t unauthorized access — and the Supreme Court’s 2021 Van Buren decision already narrowed the statute’s reach, and the en banc Nosal ruling before that rejected reading mere use-restriction violations as CFAA crimes, per Hinshaw & Culbertson’s summary of that case. This latest opinion extends that lineage into agentic AI, holding that the Assistant is “a tool, not a person for statutory purposes” and that Perplexity’s receipt of user account information didn’t amount to the kind of control needed to make it the accessing party.
Who still has leverage
Sellers of data and platform access aren’t left empty-handed. The court itself noted Amazon may have other viable claims — likely sounding in contract, trespass to chattels, or terms-of-service theories rather than a federal computer-crime statute carrying criminal exposure. That’s the real map here:
- Gains: agentic browser makers, scraping tool developers, and EFF’s Coders Rights Project clients, who now have Ninth Circuit backing against CFAA threats over user-directed tools.
- Pays: platforms like Amazon that want to block third-party agents but must now pursue narrower, harder-to-win contract or state-law claims instead of a criminal statute with outsized settlement leverage.
The CFAA just got harder to weaponize against the next generation of AI agents — but the contract-law fights over what agents are allowed to do on someone else’s website are only getting started.
Watch for whether Amazon pivots to breach-of-contract or DMCA theories, whether other circuits split on how to treat AI intermediaries, and whether platforms start rewriting terms of service specifically to target agentic browsing before the next court fight arrives.
As the court noted, Amazon might have other viable claims against Perplexity, but invoking the CFAA was both legally baseless and bad policy that "could expose users themselves to criminal liability.
