By Krishna Ravi Srinivas , Feba Sara & Gaurangi Kapoor
Publication Date: 2026-09-30 03:30:00
Artificial intelligence and digital commerce have locked horns in a case Amazon.com has filed against Perplexity AI. Amazon filed the suit in November challenging Perplexity’s Comet browser, especially its ‘Assistant’ artificial intelligence (AI) feature.
While a conventional web scraper passively harvests text to train a model, an agentic system like Assistant can take multiple actions on a user’s behalf, like a typical human agent: it can log into an account, compare products, fill a cart, enter credit card details, and complete a purchase all by itself.
Amazon’s grouse is that while the Assistant accesses customers’ password-protected accounts with the users’ permission, it lacks Amazon’s own authorisation.
The technology giant brought its claims under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. On March 9, the judge hearing the case granted a preliminary injunction reasoning that the Assistant’s access was unauthorised “regardless of whether the Amazon users had permitted Assistant to access their own Amazon accounts”.
On August 4, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction. The panel held that it was the user, not Perplexity, who had “accessed” Amazon’s servers, because Perplexity’s own systems never communicated directly with Amazon’s.
The ruling is narrow: the panel confined itself to the meaning of “access” under…
