Perplexity has successfully overturned Amazon’s injunction on its AI shopping bot – Engadget

Perplexity has successfully overturned an injunction that banned the AI shopping tool built into its Comet browser from accessing Amazon, Bloomberg reports. According to an opinion from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Amazon’s original claim that Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and shouldn’t have been rewarded with an injunction.

Successfully claiming that Perplexity violated the law requires Amazon to prove that the company intentionally accessed a computer without authorization, obtained information from that protected computer and that there was a loss “to one or more persons during any one-year period” that averaged at least $5,000 in value. Because Comet, Perplexity’s AI browser, requires user direction to use Amazon on its own, the appeals court determined it was the Comet user who was accessing Amazon’s “computers” (the servers that host Amazon.com) and not Perplexity…