On August 4, 2026 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a published opinion in Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444, vacating a preliminary injunction and remanding for further proceedings. The district court, the Northern District of California with Judge Maxine M. Chesney presiding, had granted Amazon a preliminary injunction barring Perplexity’s agentic browser tool from operating on Amazon.com, finding Amazon likely to succeed on claims under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and its California analogue, the Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA). The appeal was argued and submitted on June 11, 2026 in Seattle before Circuit Judges Milan D. Smith, Jr. and Eric C. Tung and District Judge John Charles Hinderaker of the District of Arizona, sitting by designation. Judge Smith wrote for the panel.
The disputed product is the “Assistant” inside Perplexity’s Comet browser, which, when a user activates it, navigates Amazon.com on that user’s behalf and sends browser screenshots to Perplexity’s servers for further instruction. The panel’s holding turns on a single element of the CFAA: whether Perplexity “accessed” Amazon’s computers. To succeed under the statute a plaintiff must show the defendant intentionally accessed a computer without or in excess of authorization, thereby obtained information from a protected computer, and caused at least 5,000 dollars in loss over a one-year period. On the facts before it, the panel concluded that Perplexity did not use a tool to access Amazon’s computers. Rather, it was the user who accessed Amazon’s computers, with the help of Perplexity’s agent to carry out specific acts on the site. The CDAFA claim failed for the same reason.
Having found Amazon unlikely to succeed on the merits, the panel also held the district court erred on the remaining equitable factors, which it read as favoring Perplexity: the potential harms Amazon identified did not weigh in favor of an injunction, the balance of equities favored Perplexity, and an injunction against conduct that likely does not violate the CFAA or CDAFA would not serve the public interest. The case drew an unusually broad set of amici on both sides, including the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute, the Electronic Frontier Foundation with Mozilla, the Software and Information Industry Association, the National Retail Federation, the News/Media Alliance, and Airlines for America.
The status matters more than the headline. This is an interlocutory appellate decision on a preliminary injunction, not a final judgment and not a merits ruling: the injunction is vacated and the case returns to the district court, where Amazon can still litigate its claims, including contract and other theories the panel did not resolve. What the opinion does settle for now, across the Ninth Circuit, is the framing question every operator of a consumer-facing site is currently asking: when a user points an AI agent at a website, the anti-hacking statutes look through the agent to the person who directed it. Platforms that want to keep third-party agents out will need to rely on terms of service, technical controls, or other causes of action rather than the CFAA.