# Perplexity Wins Court Ruling Against Amazon Over AI Agent Access

> A US appeals court has handed AI agents a meaningful win. The 9th Circuit vacated Amazon's preliminary injunction that had barred Perplexity's Comet agent from operating on Amazon.com, ruling that when a user tells an agent to do something, it is the user, not the software vendor, who is accessing the site. That distinction guts Amazon's central legal theory. The company had leaned on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decades-old anti-hacking statute, to argue Perplexity was trespassing on its servers. The court found Amazon unlikely to succeed on that claim, reframing the agent as a tool acting on its owner's intent rather than an intruder in its own right. The ruling does not settle everything, but it removes a big cloud hanging over agentic shopping and browsing. If an agent's actions legally belong to the person who dispatched it, retailers lose one of their sharpest weapons for walling off automated assistants, and the door to agent-driven commerce swings a little wider.

_Section: [Daily AI Updates](https://www.wortins.com/daily-ai) · Source: The Next Web · Published Saturday, August 22, 2026_

## Wortins' read

A US appeals court has handed AI agents a meaningful win. The 9th Circuit vacated Amazon's preliminary injunction that had barred Perplexity's Comet agent from operating on Amazon.com, ruling that when a user tells an agent to do something, it is the user, not the software vendor, who is accessing the site. That distinction guts Amazon's central legal theory. The company had leaned on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the decades-old anti-hacking statute, to argue Perplexity was trespassing on its servers. The court found Amazon unlikely to succeed on that claim, reframing the agent as a tool acting on its owner's intent rather than an intruder in its own right. The ruling does not settle everything, but it removes a big cloud hanging over agentic shopping and browsing. If an agent's actions legally belong to the person who dispatched it, retailers lose one of their sharpest weapons for walling off automated assistants, and the door to agent-driven commerce swings a little wider.

## Source

[Read the full story at The Next Web](https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-loses-perplexity-comet-ai-shopping-ruling)

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