Amazon wins, then loses, injunction against Perplexity's Comet shopping agent

A federal judge in the Northern District of California, Maxine Chesney, granted Amazon a preliminary injunction on 9 March 2026 blocking Perplexity’s Comet browser agent from accessing Amazon’s password-protected account pages. The court found “strong evidence” that Comet’s automated access violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and its California state-law equivalent, treating a user’s own permission to use the agent as distinct from authorisation to access the platform itself — reasoning drawn from the earlier Facebook v. Power Ventures precedent on automated access to online services.

Perplexity appealed, and the Ninth Circuit stayed the injunction pending review. Perplexity’s central argument was that a Comet user accessing Amazon from her own browser was no different in kind from a user accessing the site through any other browser, and that Amazon had shown no lost sales or reduced traffic during the months Comet had already been operating against its objections. The court of appeals ultimately agreed: on 4 August 2026, a Ninth Circuit panel vacated the injunction entirely, holding that it is the user, not Perplexity, who “accesses” a third-party server under the CFAA when directing an agent like Comet, and that Amazon was accordingly unlikely to succeed on its CFAA claim. Amazon’s separate trademark and state-law claims in the underlying suit survived the ruling and remain active.

The case became a closely watched test of whether the CFAA — written for an era of unauthorised computer intrusion, not AI agents acting on a user’s behalf — could be used by platforms to block AI shopping and browsing agents from operating on their sites, with the eventual appellate ruling narrowing that avenue.