By Naomi Foale, Freya Ollerearnshaw
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 15:52:00
The latest US case of Amazon v Perplexity AI provides helpful early insights into how courts across the pond are assessing attribution issues with agentic AI.
Background
Perplexity is an AI startup which offers users a shopping tool that provides access to an AI agent (the Assistant) that can perform tasks at a user’s direction, including browsing websites such as Amazon.com to make purchases for goods.
In November 2025, Amazon brought a claim against Perplexity, claiming that Perplexity had been wrongfully accessing Amazon’s customers’ accounts and disguising the activities of agentic AI as human browsing. Amazon claimed that the use of agentic AI in this way was not authorised by Amazon and therefore violated its Conditions of Use as well as certain US legislation on computer fraud, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).
To succeed with its CFAA claim against Perplexity, Amazon would need to show (amongst other things) that Perplexity had “intentionally accessed” its computer without authorisation (or exceeding authorised access) and thereby obtained information from its computer.
In March 2026, the District Court granted Amazon a preliminary injunction against Perplexity preventing the use of the Assistant on Amazon.com. It found that Amazon had shown a likelihood of success for its CFAA claim against Perplexity and that it was likely to suffer irreparable harm in the absence of an injunction.
