Ninth Circuit Rules AI Agents Act on Behalf of Users, Not Developers

When an autonomous AI agent accesses a password-protected website, who actually does the accessing? According to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the person who directed the agent to access the site is the one responsible, not the company that developed the agent and certainly not the agent itself.

In a case involving Perplexity and Amazon.com, a three-judge panel of the appeals court vacated a lower court’s grant of a preliminary injunction barring Perplexity from accessing password-protected Amazon accounts. In a 21-page opinion last month, the panel ruled Amazon was not entitled to the injunction because it was unlikely to succeed on its claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) that Perplexity was accessing the accounts without authorization.

The case concerned Perplexity’s Comet browser and its artificial intelligence (AI) agent, Assistant, that can carry out tasks such as searching Amazon’s website at the direction of a user. Prior to Perplexity’s launch of Comet in 2025, Amazon told Perplexity’s CEO that Perplexity’s AI products would not be permitted to access the Amazon Store. After the launch of Comet, Amazon reiterated to Perplexity that it did not have authority to access the store. When Comet users began using Assistant to scrape the Amazon Store Amazon sued Perplexity under the CFAA and its California analog, the Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA).