Here's the question at the center of a ruling that came down this week: when an AI agent logs into your Amazon account with your saved password and buys something, who actually did the shopping? You, or the software? On August 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals answered. It vacated a preliminary injunction that had blocked Perplexity's AI powered browser, Comet, from operating on Amazon.com. The court found Amazon is unlikely to win its case, and Comet gets to keep shopping.

Let's back up to how we got here. Amazon filed suit against Perplexity in November 2025, arguing that Comet's shopping agent was breaking federal and state hacking law every time it logged into a customer's account. In March 2026, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney sided with Amazon. She granted a preliminary injunction blocking Comet from touching the password protected parts of Amazon.com: account pages, order history, and checkout. Comet was frozen out. Perplexity appealed, and the Ninth Circuit put that freeze on hold while it heard the case.

The legal question here is narrower than it sounds, but the stakes are not. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 anti hacking law, and California's Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act both hinge on one word: access. Amazon argued Perplexity itself was accessing its servers without permission. The Ninth Circuit disagreed. A three judge panel found that Amazon was unlikely to show Perplexity's AI agents breached either law, because it's the user, not the software, who is doing the accessing. You gave Comet your password. You told it what to buy. The court treated that as you walking through the door, just with a very fast, very literal assistant holding your hand.

Why does this matter beyond one lawsuit? Because this is the first time an appeals court has ruled on who counts as the visitor when an AI agent does the browsing for you. That question isn't unique to Amazon. It applies to every marketplace, every airline and hotel booking site, every SaaS platform that locks content behind a login, and most of them are expected to face this exact fight within the next year. This ruling doesn't settle the law everywhere, but it's the first real precedent, and it leans hard toward AI agents having the same access rights as the humans who deploy them.

It's worth being honest about what didn't happen here too. The Ninth Circuit didn't rule that Perplexity is in the clear forever. It vacated a preliminary injunction, sending the underlying case back for further proceedings. Amazon can still pursue other legal theories, like breach of its terms of service, and it can still build technical defenses to keep agents like Comet out. The shopping fight between the two companies is not over. What is settled, for now, is the bigger principle: an AI agent acting on your instructions is legally an extension of you, not a separate unauthorized visitor.

My Take

I want to be clear eyed about what this actually means in your kitchen, not just in a courtroom. Comet works by holding your Amazon session, your saved payment info, your order history, and using all of it to complete tasks on your behalf. That data gets transmitted to Perplexity's own servers to do the work. This ruling makes it more likely that tools like this spread fast, because Amazon just lost its strongest legal tool for keeping them out. Convenience is real. So is the fact that you're now trusting a third party company with the keys to your account, and there's no independent referee checking what it does with them once you hand them over.

So before you let any AI browser or shopping agent loose on your accounts, do the boring but important thing: read what permissions it's actually asking for. Use a dedicated card with a spending limit if you're testing one of these tools, not your main card. Check whether the tool lets you review or reverse an action before it's final, not just after. None of that is anti-AI. It's just the same due diligence you'd use before handing anyone else your house key.