By PPC Land
Publication Date: 2026-03-10 16:12:00
A federal court today granted Amazon a preliminary injunction blocking Perplexity AI’s Comet browser from accessing password-protected sections of the Amazon website using artificial intelligence agents – a ruling that draws a sharp legal boundary around what autonomous software can do inside third-party platforms without explicit authorisation from the platform itself.
United States District Judge Maxine M. Chesney, sitting in the Northern District of California, issued the order on March 9, 2026, in Case No. 25-cv-09514-MMC. The decision caps a legal confrontation that began when Amazon filed its complaint on November 4, 2025, marking the first time the e-commerce giant had taken legal action against an AI company over autonomous shopping agents.
The order is stayed for seven days from today’s date to allow Perplexity to seek a stay from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Should that application fail, the injunction takes effect in full.
What Comet’s AI agents were doing
The dispute centres on Perplexity’s Comet browser, which launched on July 9, 2025, initially available only to subscribers of the company’s $200-per-month Max plan. The browser runs on Chromium architecture and includes an AI assistant capable of navigating websites, executing purchases, and performing multi-step tasks on behalf of users.
According to the court order, Amazon provided strong evidence that Comet accesses a user’s password-protected Amazon account “with the Amazon user’s…