The Ruling That Will Not Go Away
A federal appeals court declined this month to rehear Amazon's challenge to a ruling that favored Perplexity's AI shopping agent, Comet. The decision leaves standing an August opinion from the Ninth Circuit that lifted an injunction against Comet making purchases on Amazon.com. That injunction had come from Judge Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California, who found in March that Amazon would likely prove Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and ordered the company to destroy data its agent had collected while operating on Amazon's site.
Circuit Judge Milan Smith wrote for the panel that it is the user, not Perplexity, who accesses Amazon's computers when Comet completes a purchase. Perplexity receiving a screenshot or sending an instruction back to the browser does not, in the court's reasoning, amount to gaining entry to Amazon's servers itself. Amazon argued in its rehearing request that the ruling degraded a website owner's ability to set terms for how fast-evolving agent technology interacts with its systems, and that the assistant would access Amazon regardless of whose control it claimed to operate under.
Why a Procedural Rejection Still Matters
A denial of rehearing is not a final verdict on the underlying dispute, which started when Amazon alleged last November that Comet made purchases for users despite technical blocks and a direct cease and desist demand. But it does confirm that the August reasoning now governs the case as it proceeds, and the court made clear it was not inclined to revisit the core legal theory. Amazon has not said whether it will seek Supreme Court review, and it has not responded publicly to requests for comment on its next move.
The practical effect is that Amazon's primary legal lever against unwanted shopping agents, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, just got weaker in the circuit that covers most of the technology industry. Other large platforms watching this case, from marketplaces to travel sites to financial services apps, now have less confidence that a CFAA claim alone will stop an agent a user has invited onto their account, even when the platform never consented to the integration.
A Playbook Other Platforms Will Still Try
Losing the legal argument does not mean Amazon is out of options, and retail technology leaders should watch what it tries next rather than assume the fight is over. Technical blocking, rate limiting, CAPTCHA challenges, and account-level restrictions remain available tools, and Amazon can still pursue breach of contract claims under its terms of service even where a CFAA claim fails. What changes is the legal backstop behind those technical measures: a platform that blocks an agent now does so knowing a court may not back up that block if a user sues or an agent vendor challenges it.
That shifts the calculation for every commerce platform deciding how to treat unauthorized agents. A defensive strategy built entirely on technical blocking plus the threat of litigation just lost a meaningful amount of its deterrent value in one of the country's most influential circuits. Expect platforms to lean harder on terms of service enforcement and account suspension, measures that do not require proving unauthorized computer access, while they wait to see whether this case or a similar one eventually reaches the Supreme Court.
Two Strategic Bets on the Same Ruling
If you run technology for a retailer or marketplace, this ruling sharpens a decision you may have been able to defer: build toward a future where third-party shopping agents interact with your site on terms you negotiate, or commit to blocking agents you did not approve and accept that your legal footing for doing so just weakened. Target, Walmart, and other large retailers have chosen the first path, co-developing protocols like OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol rather than fighting agent access outright. That approach lets them control data sharing, checkout experience, and brand presentation inside the agent interaction, trading some control over who initiates contact for control over how the interaction actually runs.
Amazon has made the opposite bet, defending its storefront against agents it never invited, and this ruling makes that bet measurably more expensive to sustain. For most retail and commerce businesses outside Amazon's scale, the more defensible path is the one Target and Walmart are on: negotiate the terms of agent access now, while you still have leverage, rather than lean on a legal theory that just lost ground in one of the country's most influential federal circuits.
What to Do Before the Next Ruling Lands
Treat this case as an early signal still open to revision. Amazon can still appeal further or pursue contract-based claims, and a different circuit or a future Supreme Court case could reach a different answer on how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act applies to agents acting on a user's behalf. Retail technology leaders should treat this as one data point rather than a full strategy, while still stopping the assumption that blocking alone is a durable long-term control, and starting to build the contractual and technical groundwork for negotiated access regardless of which way the law ultimately settles.
Concretely, that means getting terms of service language ready that addresses agent access explicitly rather than relying on generic bot-blocking clauses, and building the technical capability to detect and route agent traffic differently from human traffic even if you choose not to block it outright. The retailers best positioned a year from now will be the ones who treated this ruling as a signal to prepare for negotiated agent access, not as either a crisis to panic over or a problem that resolved itself.
