Ninth Circuit: the CFAA won't block AI shopping agents

The legal shortcut for keeping AI shopping agents off your storefront just got closed. On August 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction Amazon had won against Perplexity's Comet browser, holding that when an agent acts at a user's direction, it's the user who accesses your servers — not the company that shipped the agent. If you sell online, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is no longer the tool you reach for.

What actually happened

Amazon sued Perplexity over Comet, its agentic browser, and won a preliminary injunction at the district level. The appeals court took it apart.

Per Engadget, the panel found that because Comet only acts when a user directs it, the access is the user's. To win on the CFAA, Amazon would have to show intentional unauthorized access plus losses clearing the statute's $5,000 threshold — and the court concluded that an injunction against conduct that likely doesn't violate the CFAA wouldn't serve the public interest.

The EFF, which filed in support, points to the reasoning that matters: the assistant is "a tool, not a person for statutory purposes," and is operated by users rather than by Perplexity.

What survives: the underlying suit continues in San Francisco federal court, and Amazon's non-CFAA claims are still live. Amazon can seek rehearing or petition the Supreme Court. Its statement was one sentence of disagreement — it "respectfully disagree[s]" with the decision and is evaluating next steps.

Note what this is not. It isn't a ruling that agents may do anything they like on your site. It's a ruling that a federal anti-hacking statute written in 1986 doesn't convert a user-directed browser into a criminal intrusion.

Why AI agent access matters for your business

We covered Amazon blocking outside agents back in July. The blocking still works. The lawsuit backing it up just got weaker.

Access control is engineering, not litigation. If you don't want agent traffic, you enforce that with rate limits, bot management, authentication, and terms of service you actually enforce — the same stack you already use for scrapers. A cease-and-desist citing the CFAA is now a much thinner threat, and Amazon has the legal budget most of us don't.

Assume agents reach your catalog. The largest retailer in the country spent months and an appellate docket trying to keep one browser out, and it's back. Your robots.txt is a request. Plan for a world where a meaningful share of your product pages get read by software acting for a buyer who never sees your design.

That makes your product data the storefront. Structured attributes, real inventory counts, unambiguous pricing, clean variant names. An agent comparing your listing to three competitors' is parsing fields, not admiring your hero image. Thin data is how you lose a sale you never knew was happening.

And watch the direction of travel. The court said as much — there's little existing case law on assigning responsibility for AI agents, and this holding is narrow. Build for the technical reality, not for a precedent that could get revisited.

Sources: Engadget, Electronic Frontier Foundation.