A federal appeals court ruled on August 4, 2026 that it’s users, not AI companies, who “access” a website under a 1986 anti-hacking law, clearing Perplexity’s Comet browser to keep shopping on Amazon and setting a real precedent for how far platforms can go to block AI agents.
Quick facts
- The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated Amazon’s preliminary injunction against Perplexity’s Comet browser on August 4, 2026.
- Amazon sued in November 2025, arguing Comet’s AI shopping assistant violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by accessing Amazon’s logged-in pages without authorization.
- The panel ruled that Comet’s own architecture means the user’s browser visits Amazon; Comet receives screenshots the user’s browser already captured.
- The court applied the rule of lenity, construing ambiguity in the criminal statute against liability.
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed an amicus brief the panel cited as clarifying how Comet’s architecture actually works.
The technical distinction the ruling actually turns on
Per EFF’s own analysis of the decision, the court’s reasoning is narrowly technical, and that’s exactly what makes it significant: Comet doesn’t independently reach into Amazon’s servers, it receives a screenshot the user’s own browser already captured, then returns instructions based on it. Amazon had argued that distinction was a legal fiction, comparing it in a court filing to an arsonist blaming the postman for delivering a mail bomb. The panel rejected that framing.
Why platforms have leaned on this specific law before
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, written in 1986 for a pre-web internet, has repeatedly been used by platforms to try to block competitors and scrapers under an anti-hacking framing rather than more typical contract or copyright claims. Applying a 1986 statute to a tool where the whole point is that a human explicitly delegates action to their own software agent proved to be a genuinely hard fit, and this is the first time a circuit court has ruled directly on that specific arrangement.
Why this matters beyond one shopping browser
The ruling establishes real legal room for the broader category of agentic browsing and shopping tools, not just Comet specifically, as long as an agent’s architecture genuinely operates on explicit user instruction rather than independently reaching into a platform’s systems. That’s a meaningful precedent for any computer-use agent built around a similar screenshot-and-instruct architecture.
Key takeaway
This resolves the preliminary injunction, not necessarily the full underlying case, but it’s a strong, reasoned signal from a circuit court that user-delegated AI agents aren’t automatically “hacking” a site just because the site would prefer they didn’t visit. Expect other platforms weighing similar CFAA claims against AI agents to take real notice of how narrowly this ruling was decided.
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