Appeals Court Vacates Amazon’s Injunction Against Perplexity’s Comet Shopping Agent

A federal appeals court has thrown out the preliminary injunction Amazon won against Perplexity’s AI shopping agent. In an opinion issued Tuesday, a Ninth Circuit panel vacated the order that barred the Assistant in Perplexity’s Comet browser from operating on Amazon.com and sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings.

Amazon sued in November 2025 under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s counterpart, the Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. After a March hearing, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California granted Amazon’s request for a preliminary injunction, calling it a close call in her tentative ruling. The Ninth Circuit later put that injunction on hold while Perplexity appealed.

Comet is a browser that runs locally on a user’s machine, with an optional AI agent that can carry out tasks such as shopping on Amazon.com. According to the opinion, the Assistant takes screenshots of the browser view, sends them to Perplexity’s servers and receives instructions on how to navigate the site. Amazon had told Perplexity before Comet’s release that its AI products were not permitted on the Amazon Store. Central to the dispute was Perplexity’s decision not to use a user-agent string identifying the AI agent, which would have let Amazon block it; the parties dispute whether Perplexity knowingly changed that string after Amazon first blocked the Assistant.

Writing for the panel, Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. concluded that Amazon was unlikely to show Perplexity “accessed” its computers. “Rather, it was the user who ‘accessed’ Amazon’s computers, with the help of Perplexity’s AI agent, the ‘Assistant,’ to carry out specific acts on Amazon.com,” according to a summary prepared by court staff. The panel found the same reasoning applied to the state-law claim and held that the remaining factors, including the balance of hardships and the public interest, favored Perplexity.

The ruling has limits. The court wrote that the outcome “does not impair Amazon’s ability to regulate access to Amazon.com via private terms of service for its users,” only its attempt to do so through the CFAA and the California law.

The Knight First Amendment Institute, which filed an amicus brief with the ACLU, welcomed the decision. “Computer crime laws like the CFAA shouldn’t be stretched to penalize tools that automate a user’s access to their own information,” staff attorney Jake Karr said.