The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a preliminary injunction that had barred Perplexity’s Comet browser from operating on Amazon.com, ruling on August 4, 2026 that users, not Perplexity, are the ones accessing Amazon’s servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The panel applied the rule of lenity to resolve statutory ambiguity in favor of the developer, noting there is little existing case law on how to assign responsibility for AI agents acting on a user’s behalf. The case returns to district court, where Amazon’s trademark and state-law claims against Perplexity remain active.
