Amazon initiated legal action against Perplexity AI in November 2025 following the company's failure to respond to cease-and-desist notices. The retailer alleged that the Comet browser agent accessed protected customer accounts without authorization and disguised its automated activity as human behavior via the Chrome browser.
The lawsuit invoked the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. On March 9-10, 2026, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction against the agent, citing unauthorized access concerns.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated this injunction on August 4, 2026. Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. concluded that because the agent operates only under user direction, the user is the one accessing the platform, not the software itself. The court declined to rehear the case on September 10, 2026.
The litigation remains ongoing as the district court prepares to review an amended complaint. Future proceedings may focus on whether data flows directly to Perplexity’s infrastructure, which could provide Amazon with grounds to distinguish the agent's operations from the scenario analyzed by the appeals court.
