The 9th Circuit just made the user the legal AI agent

When software shops on your behalf, the law still treats you as the one who walked in. That is the structural call the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals made in overturning Amazon's block of Perplexity's Comet browser, and PerthNow's wire calls it the first federal appeals precedent for the entire agentic AI field. The court read the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act the same way a guard at a store would: the person at the door is the customer, even if a robot is carrying their bags. Perplexity's agent did not access Amazon. Perplexity's user did, with the company's help. The ruling's narrow phrasing does the heavy lifting. Every platform that wants to keep agentic browsers out now has to argue it is restricting the human, not the tool, which is a much harder suit to win and a much louder one to file. Amazon's security-and-unauthorized-access argument loses its clean statutory hook, while Perplexity's combative "rights of users" framing picks up the legal weight. The repeatable mechanism: a tool that acts through a logged-in user inherits that user's legal identity, and a platform that wants to ban the tool has to ban the user first. That is the test every agentic-AI lawsuit now arrives at.