Amazon loses US court ban on Perplexity's AI shopping tools

Amazon sued Perplexity in November, accusing the AI startup of covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts through its Comet browser and associated AI agent, which can log into users' online shopping accounts and place orders on their behalf. The lawsuit said Perplexity's system posed security risks and that it had ignored repeated requests to stop.

Perplexity responded that the lawsuit lacked merit and was a "bald attempt" to block Amazon users from using Comet because AI agents "don’t have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with."

A federal judge in California temporarily blocked Perplexity in March from using its agentic AI on Amazon's platform, finding Amazon had presented "strong evidence" that Perplexity's AI agent broke a U.S. computer fraud and abuse law.

The 9th Circuit overturned the ban on Tuesday, favoring Perplexity's argument that it did not violate a statute that prohibits people from accessing computers and obtaining information from them without permission. The appeals court said it was Perplexity's users, using the company's AI agents, who "accessed" Amazon's platform under the law, rather than Perplexity itself.