Two months ago, I wrote about a federal judge blocking Perplexity’s Comet browser from shopping on Amazon. The ruling split user consent from platform authorization — your permission doesn’t count unless the platform says yes too.

That was the opening move. Here’s what happened since.

Perplexity appealed. The Ninth Circuit paused the injunction on March 16, which means Comet can technically operate on Amazon right now while the appeal plays out. On April 1, Perplexity filed its opening brief arguing the whole case is a misapplication of a 1984 anti-hacking law. Then things got interesting.

The EFF filed an amicus brief supporting Perplexity. So did the ACLU and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia. Their argument: if a user tells an AI agent to access their own Amazon account, that’s the user’s right. The platform doesn’t get a veto.

Then the other side showed up. Digital Content Next — representing the AP, BBC Studios, Bloomberg, Conde Nast, the Financial Times, Fox News, The Guardian, Hearst, NBC Universal, News Corp, the New York Times, NPR, Vox Media, and the Washington Post — filed a 29-page brief supporting Amazon. The Software & Information Industry Association filed one too.

Read that list again. Nearly every major news publisher in the English-speaking world lined up behind Amazon in an agentic commerce case. Not because they care about Amazon’s marketplace. Because the same legal logic that protects Amazon’s ad layer protects theirs.

When Comet shops on Amazon, it skips sponsored product placements and ignores remarketing pixels. It doesn’t generate the behavioral data that Amazon sells back to brands. Perplexity’s own lawyers admitted this in a January filing: “AI agents don’t have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with.”

Replace “Amazon” with “the New York Times” and the same sentence explains why publishers showed up. If agents can extract content without users seeing ads, journalism’s business model breaks the same way retail media does. The publishers showed up for their own business model, not Amazon’s.

On Thursday, May 15, Judge Chesney holds a hearing in San Francisco. It’s procedural, not a merits ruling — Perplexity wants the entire district court case paused while the Ninth Circuit decides the appeal. Amazon wants the case to keep moving. A case management conference at 10:30 AM sets the trial timeline. What happens Thursday tells us how fast this moves, not how it ends.

The Ninth Circuit appeal is where the real decision happens. Three questions the panel has to answer:

Does the CFAA require platform authorization separate from user consent? That’s the core question. Judge Chesney said yes at the injunction stage. If the Ninth Circuit agrees, every AI agent needs explicit permission from every platform it touches. If they disagree, user consent flows to the agent.

Does the CFAA even apply when the access happens on the user’s own device, with the user’s own credentials? Perplexity’s argument is that Comet runs on your computer, logged in with your Amazon password, doing what you asked it to do. That’s software.

Does masquerading as Chrome matter? Comet transmitted the same user-agent string as Google Chrome. It disguised itself as a regular browser to avoid detection. This is the detail that hurt Perplexity most at the injunction stage. The judge found it decisive. But it’s a fact pattern, not a legal principle. The appellate question is whether spoofing alone is enough to constitute unauthorized access under a statute written 40 years ago.

Perplexity has favorable precedent to work with. In hiQ v. LinkedIn, the Ninth Circuit held that scraping publicly accessible data doesn’t violate the CFAA. That case is factually different — Amazon accounts are password-protected — but the legal principle (narrow interpretation of “without authorization”) cuts in Perplexity’s direction. The Supreme Court narrowed the CFAA in Van Buren v. United States in 2021, holding that using legitimate access for an unauthorized purpose isn’t the same as accessing without authorization. Perplexity’s brief leans hard on both.

Forget the statute. Amazon’s strongest argument is the paper trail. Five warnings between September and November 2025. A cease-and-desist letter. A technical block that Perplexity circumvented within 24 hours. After all that, Perplexity kept operating. Courts care about conduct, and Perplexity’s conduct looked like someone who was told to stop and chose not to.

So what’s actually at stake for brands?

If Amazon wins and the injunction holds through appeal, platforms can legally block any AI agent from accessing their systems, regardless of whether the user wants the agent there. That means the only agents that work on Amazon are agents Amazon approves. Which means Rufus. Which means Amazon’s ad layer stays intact. Which means the retail media model continues as-is, with AI agents routed through official channels that preserve sponsored placements.

If Perplexity wins, user consent equals agent authorization. Any agent can shop anywhere the user has an account. That opens Amazon, Walmart, Target, and every other retailer to third-party agents operating outside the platform’s control. The ad model gets disrupted. Discovery moves off-platform permanently. Brands that rely on Amazon’s search ranking and sponsored products for visibility suddenly compete with agents that skip past all of it.

The most likely outcome is narrow: the Ninth Circuit rules on the spoofing question, says Comet was wrong to disguise itself as Chrome, and avoids the broad question about platform authorization vs. user consent. Every legal commentator covering this case has said the same thing. The spoofing facts are so bad for Perplexity that the court has an easy off-ramp from the hard question.

But the Ninth Circuit is the most tech-friendly appellate court in the country. If Perplexity draws a favorable panel, they might reach the bigger question — and the hiQ and Van Buren precedents both push toward narrow CFAA interpretation. If the court says user consent extends to agents, that rewrites the rules for every platform, not just Amazon.

Meanwhile, Amazon is building for the outcome it wants regardless. The job posting from last week — a Principal TPM overseeing a 40-person engineering org building third-party agent APIs — signals dedicated infrastructure for authorized agent access. No scraping, no spoofing. An API that Amazon controls, on Amazon’s terms.

I don’t know that the legal fight and the infrastructure fight are coordinated inside Amazon. It’s a company with 1.5 million employees. But they’re pointed in the same direction: platforms are building walls with doors in them. The doors will have a price.

Three things to watch:

  1. Thursday’s hearing itself. If Judge Chesney grants the stay, the district case pauses and all the action moves to the Ninth Circuit. That timeline is months, not weeks. If she denies it, Amazon gets to keep building its legal case at both levels simultaneously, which pressures Perplexity.
  2. The Ninth Circuit oral argument schedule. Once Amazon’s response brief and any reply briefs are filed, the court will schedule oral arguments. That’s when we get real signals about how the panel is leaning. The Ninth Circuit is the most favorable appellate court in the country for narrow CFAA interpretation. Perplexity picked its best venue.
  3. Google I/O on May 19. If Google announces UCP updates or new agent commerce features, the timing creates a direct contrast: Amazon is fighting agents in court while Google is building open protocols for them. That gap in strategy will matter for brands choosing where to invest.

The case is Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., 3:25-cv-09514 in the Northern District of California. The appeal is docket 26-1444 in the Ninth Circuit.

Almost nobody in the brand or agency world is following this. They should be. This is the only federal case testing whether AI agents have the legal right to shop on platforms. It’s a commercial dispute between two companies, but the precedent it sets applies to every agent and every platform. The legal architecture of agentic commerce is being written in one courtroom in San Francisco, and it determines whether your products show up when an agent shops.

Sources: CourtListener, CNBC, GeekWire, EFF, ACLU, Knight Institute, Press Gazette, SIIA, PYMNTS, Cooley, Perplexity, Marketing Brew