A US Appeals Court Let AI Shopping Agents Back Onto Amazon

The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals has vacated the preliminary injunction that kept Perplexity's shopping agent off Amazon, finding Amazon unlikely to succeed on its claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The court's reasoning turned on attribution: when the agent inside Perplexity's Comet browser logs in and places an order, it is the user accessing Amazon.

How it got here

• In March, Judge Maxine Chesney in a federal California court granted a temporary injunction, finding strong evidence that Perplexity had accessed password-protected accounts with the user's permission and without Amazon's authorisation, and ordered Perplexity to delete copies of Amazon data.

• Amazon argued that third-party AI should operate transparently through established APIs, pointing to its own Buy For Me and Rufus tools, and alleged security risks plus ignored cease-and-desist demands.

• Perplexity's position was that an agent acting on a user's behalf carries the same rights as the person, and it characterised Amazon's stance as bullying.

The appeals court vacated the injunction only. The underlying case has not been decided.

What this means for you

The procedural outcome matters less than the reasoning. If a court treats an agent following a user's instruction as that user, then a retailer's ability to keep agents out rests on product and contract decisions rather than on computer-misuse law. That reading is now on the record from a federal appeals court, and it will be cited.

For anyone selling online, the practical question this raises is whether your own site is navigable by an agent at all. Logged-in flows, cart steps that depend on hover states, checkouts gated behind a challenge that only a human passes: each one is a place where an assistant shopping on your customer's behalf gives up and goes to a competitor that is easier to transact with.

Amazon's own answer to agents is to ship its own. That option is available to very few retailers, which makes agent-readiness the realistic version of the same strategy.