9th Circuit Vacates Injunction Against Perplexity, Says Users — Not Perplexity — Accessed Amazon

A federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out a preliminary injunction Amazon had won against Perplexity AI, ruling that Amazon was unlikely, on the current record, to show that Perplexity itself accessed Amazon’s systems in violation of federal or California anti-hacking law.

In a published opinion issued Aug. 4, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction and sent the case back to the lower court. The dispute centers on Perplexity’s Comet browser and its optional AI Assistant, which Amazon says improperly interacted with Amazon users’ accounts and Amazon’s systems for tasks such as comparison shopping and purchases directed by users.

The ruling matters beyond the two companies because it addresses how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the main federal anti-hacking law, applies to AI-enabled browser tools. Companies have long invoked the law, known as the CFAA, in fights over scraping, automation and third-party software. The Ninth Circuit said that, on these facts, creating a user-operated tool was not the same as the developer itself accessing a website’s servers.

Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025 under the CFAA and California Penal Code Section 502, a parallel state computer-access law sometimes called the CDAFA. Amazon’s theory was that Perplexity, through the Assistant, was accessing Amazon without authorization or in excess of authorization when users employed the tool inside the Comet browser.

But the appeals court said the record before it showed a different technical setup. According to the opinion, the Assistant runs inside the user’s browser, captures screenshots of what the user sees on the user’s device, sends those screenshots and the user’s instructions to Perplexity’s servers, and receives guidance back. “Perplexity’s servers never directly access Amazon’s servers,” the panel wrote.

That architecture was central to the court’s conclusion that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on the key element of “access” required for its CFAA and CDAFA claims at the preliminary-injunction stage. On this record, the panel said, the users operating Comet were the ones accessing Amazon, not Perplexity.

The court said agentic AI systems may raise new legal questions, but it declined to treat Perplexity’s Assistant as if it were a separate legal actor. The Assistant “is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes,” the opinion said.

The Ninth Circuit applied that reasoning to both the federal and California claims, finding Amazon had not shown it was likely to establish the required access by Perplexity itself. In discussing how the system worked, the panel said the EFF amicus “articulates the nature of the system most clearly,” referring to a filing from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The injunction that was reversed had been issued March 9 by U.S. District Judge Maxine M. Chesney of the Northern District of California. Tuesday’s decision does not end the case. It sends the dispute back to the trial court for further proceedings.

The appellate panel stressed that its ruling was limited and fact-specific. It said it was not deciding whether Perplexity could face liability on a different record showing more control over the Assistant. It also did not foreclose other claims Amazon might try to pursue on remand. The opinion is about statutory computer-access liability, not whether Amazon may have other legal avenues, such as claims tied to contractual terms.

The panel also pointed to a practical problem with Amazon’s broader reading of the law. If merely using a browser-based assistant counted as Perplexity’s unauthorized access, the court said, Amazon’s theory “could expose users themselves to criminal liability.”

That warning captured the court’s central concern: however novel AI-assisted browsing tools may be, the anti-hacking statutes at issue still turn on who actually accessed the computer system. On the record now before the court, the Ninth Circuit said, that was the user.