If you sell your own designs online, you should care about a case you’ve probably never heard of. Amazon is suing Perplexity over Comet, Perplexity’s AI browser, whose assistant can log into a shopper’s Amazon account and browse, compare, and buy on their behalf. The fight is nominally about one browser and one retailer. The underlying question is whether a website owner can keep an AI agent out when a customer sent it in, and it will eventually touch every brand that sells online, independent designers included.
Where the case stands
Amazon sued Perplexity in federal court in San Francisco in November 2025, claiming that Comet’s assistant accessed password-protected customer accounts in violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and its California counterpart, the CDAFA. On March 9, 2026, Judge Maxine M. Chesney granted Amazon a preliminary injunction. It barely took effect: within days the Ninth Circuit put it on hold while Perplexity appealed.
On August 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction and sent the case back. The court held that Amazon was unlikely to succeed because Perplexity was not the one “accessing” Amazon’s computers. “However advanced the Assistant currently is, it is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes,” the court wrote. “It is the user who ‘accesses’ Amazon’s computers, with the help of the Assistant.” The court reached the same result under California’s statute, and it found that the balance of harms and the public interest favored Perplexity, not Amazon. It was careful about the limits of its ruling: “We do not establish a new legal regime governing agentic AI.”
Amazon asked the full Ninth Circuit to rehear the case. The court declined, and the case returned to the district court on September 18. Three days later, Amazon filed an amended complaint with a new approach. It focuses on Comet for iPhone, which Perplexity launched on March 18, after the injunction, and alleges that this version runs through Perplexity’s own “cloud servers.” It accuses Perplexity of making misstatements to the Ninth Circuit about the iPhone app. And it adds a new claim: that Perplexity interfered with Amazon’s contracts with its customers. Amazon’s Conditions of Use include “Agent Terms” that apply “if you use, allow, enable or cause the deployment of an Agent” on Amazon, and Amazon says Comet breaks them because the browser doesn’t signal to Amazon when the AI assistant is the one making requests.
On October 13, Perplexity moved to dismiss the amended complaint with prejudice and, in the same motion, asked the court to pause discovery until it rules. It argues that nothing in the new allegations changes the appeals court’s answer, because the iPhone and desktop versions “work the same way in all legally relevant respects,” and the user still decides what the assistant does. On the contract claim, it argues that Amazon’s Conditions of Use are an “at-will contract that Amazon imposes on ordinary consumers, few (if any) of whom read it,” that they bind shoppers rather than the companies that build their tools, and that Amazon hasn’t identified any specific contract Perplexity interfered with. If Amazon’s theory worked, Perplexity says, it could sue “any third party who interacts with any (even unidentified) Amazon customer” in a way that breaks Amazon’s terms.
Amazon is pushing the other way. A day earlier, it filed a motion to compel discovery from Perplexity, which Judge Chesney referred to Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse. The motion to dismiss is set for a hearing on November 20, 2026.
Why it matters for independent brands
Most of the legal fights we cover involve a brand using AI on a model or creator. This one runs the other direction: AI tools acting on behalf of shoppers on your site. Independent designers increasingly compete for traffic with AI assistants that browse, compare, and sometimes buy on a customer’s instruction.
The Ninth Circuit’s ruling makes one route to controlling those agents much harder. If an AI agent acting on a shopper’s say-so is legally just the shopper, a brand will struggle to call it “unauthorized access” under computer-hacking laws, whether the agent is buying, scraping prices, or collecting sizing data. But the court left another route open, and said so in a footnote: “This outcome does not impair Amazon’s ability to regulate access to Amazon.com via private terms of service for its users.”
That is exactly the door Amazon is now trying to walk through. If its terms-of-service theory survives, brands with carefully drafted website terms will have a real argument that uninvited AI agents are off-limits, even when the hacking laws don’t reach them. If it fails, a designer’s control over who, or what, browses their storefront will come down mostly to technical blocking, not law.
What to watch
The next date is November 20, when Judge Chesney hears Perplexity’s motion to dismiss and its request to pause discovery. Before then, watch the discovery fight in front of Judge Tse: if Amazon gets the records it wants, it could learn, and eventually show the court, exactly how Comet’s traffic reached its systems.
Then watch two things in the ruling. First, whether the new allegations about the iPhone app running through Perplexity’s own servers change the “access” analysis; the Ninth Circuit expressly left open whether Perplexity could gain entry to Amazon’s systems on different facts. Second, whether the terms-of-service claim survives on its own.
For independent designers, the practical takeaway for now: if your site terms restrict automated or AI-driven browsing, this case will tell you whether those terms do any work in court, or whether, as the Ninth Circuit put it, the agent is just a tool and the shopper is the one at the door.
