Amazon won a preliminary injunction against Perplexity's Comet AI shopping agent on March 9th, 2026. A week later, the 9th Circuit granted an administrative stay — a procedural pause to allow full briefing — before taking any substantive action on the injunction. Those are different things: Chesney ruled on the merits; the appeals court merely pressed pause while the parties argue.
U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney found that Amazon had presented "strong evidence" that Perplexity's Comet agent accessed Amazon's systems illegally — specifically, that Perplexity had "concealed" its automated traffic by disguising it as human browsing, in order to continue scraping Amazon's platform after receiving a cease-and-desist. Reuters reported that Chesney's ruling, issued March 9th, blocked Perplexity from operating Comet on Amazon's platform. The enforcement was stayed for one week to allow Perplexity to seek emergency relief from the 9th Circuit. Perplexity did exactly that, and on March 17th the appeals court granted an administrative stay. Reuters confirmed the stay; CNBC covered both developments. Comet remains operational while the appeal proceeds.
The legal question is the CFAA — the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same statute that has governed unauthorized computer access since 1986. The act was written for a world where "authorization" meant a login credential or an explicit permission grant. AI agents complicate that frame in a specific way: when a user directs an AI to buy something on their behalf, the user is authorized to access Amazon. But does that user's authorization extend to the AI acting as their agent? And can Amazon revoke that extension without revoking the user's own access? Chesney found Amazon had shown a likely success on the merits — meaning she thought Amazon would probably win at trial. The 9th Circuit did not rule on the merits; it issued a temporary administrative pause to allow full briefing before taking any substantive action on the injunction.
Amazon's complaint, filed in November 2025 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (No. 3:25-cv-09514), lays out three distinct harms. The first is security: AI agents accessing private customer accounts can operate within protected systems, including accounts requiring passwords, creating data exposure risks. The second is direct cost: CNBC reports that Amazon says it spent more than $5,000 responding to Perplexity's scraping, including "numerous hours" developing tools to detect and block Comet. The third is advertising economics: AI-generated traffic produces impressions that must be detected and filtered before advertisers are billed, requiring new detection infrastructure to maintain contractual obligations with Amazon's ad buyers.
Perplexity's defense has a certain internal logic. Its position, stated in a court filing and repeated after the 9th Circuit stay: users have the right to choose their own AI, and Comet acts at the user's direction, not against it. The company's November response called Amazon's lawsuit a "bald attempt" to block users from an AI that "doesn't have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with." The framing is that Perplexity is not stealing access — it is enabling users to exercise choice that Amazon would rather not give them. Whether that argument survives contact with the CFAA's text is what the appeal will test.
What makes this significant beyond the two companies is the precedent question. If Chesney's reasoning stands — that an AI agent operating at a user's direction still needs the platform's separate authorization — then every AI agent that browses, purchases, or extracts data from a third-party platform without an explicit API agreement is operating in legal limbo. That includes AI research agents that scrape sites for data, AI shopping assistants that operate across multiple retailers, and AI agents that automate workflows by acting as a human user would. The CFAA was not written for this. Courts will have to decide whether it applies.
The competitive dimension is worth noting without overstating it. Amazon has broadly blocked AI agents from its shopping platform — including, per its own disclosure, OpenAI's ChatGPT — while investing in Rufus, its own AI shopping assistant that operates natively on the site. Amazon says it is protecting customer security and advertising integrity. Perplexity says Amazon is protecting a competitive monopoly. Both things can be true. The courts will decide the legal question. The competitive implications will play out in the market.
The full case is set to proceed. What the 9th Circuit decides on the stay — and ultimately on the merits — will determine whether AI agents need platform authorization separate from user authorization to operate on commercial websites. That is a question every company building agentic AI products, and every platform concerned about being scraped by agents, will eventually have to answer.
