When Can Amazon Block an Agentic AI Service?-Amazon v. Perplexity (Guest Blog Post) - Technology & Marketing Law Blog
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Browse: Home<br>" 2026<br>" June<br>" When Can Amazon Block an Agentic AI Service?–Amazon v. Perplexity (Guest Blog Post)
When Can Amazon Block an Agentic AI Service?–Amazon v. Perplexity (Guest Blog Post)
June 6, 2026 · by Eric Goldman · in E-Commerce, Licensing/Contracts, Trespass to Chattels
by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy
On March 9, 2026, Judge Chesney granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Amazon v. Perplexity, concluding Amazon was likely to succeed on its CFAA and California Penal Code section 502 theories.
If you’re familiar with the CFAA, the outcome of the preliminary injunction opinion was what you might expect.
But it is underwhelming in some new and interesting ways. It is, in my opinion, a shockingly poor effort to grapple with CFAA applicability to agentic AI technology after Van Buren.
If you’re unfamiliar, agentic AI is simply the name for AI that actually does work for you instead of answering questions. An agent can take a loose goal, break it into steps, use tools, gather information, make decisions, and come back with the task done. That makes it useful for the work people hate but still need judgment to finish, such as research, product comparisons, customer support, and multi-step coordination.
One valuable use case for agentic AI is shopping. Not only can Agentic AI tell you what the highest rated toaster on Amazon is for under $100, it can actually buy it for you.
You can tell agentic AI:
Buy a toaster on Amazon for under $100. Prioritize name brands, Amazon Prime shipping, and wide slots for bagels. Do not buy based solely on Amazon rating. Consider only models with at least 1,000 reviews, a rating of 4.7 or higher, and no obvious fake-review pattern. Cross-check at least two independent review sources or testing sites for confirmation that the quality is among the best at this price point. Choose a 2-slice toaster unless a 4-slice model is clearly better.
If one option is clearly superior under these criteria, add it to my cart and proceed to purchase. If not, add the best by these measures and I will review and purchase.
The thing about instructions like these is that they totally kill many of the ways online e-commerce sites make money. Amazon doesn’t just make money from selling you stuff and sending it to you. They also make money from product placement, ads, upselling, and a million other ways of nudging you into buying more stuff.
Amazon wants their search bar to be the way that you buy things online. But if the interface for your shopping becomes the AI labs’ platforms, that’s a big deal for e-commerce sites. It’s an existential threat to some e-commerce platforms and a major margins headwind for giants like Amazon and Walmart.
Those are the stakes.
The injunction in this case arose from Amazon’s challenge to Perplexity’s Comet browser and shopping agent. Perplexity built a tool that allows software to shop for users on Amazon through their logged-in accounts. Amazon sent a cease-and-desist letter. But Comet didn’t stop.
Created by ChatGPT Dec. 2025
The court focused on a familiar question for CFAA folks, which is that Amazon allegedly revoked authorization, Perplexity’s agents continued accessing Amazon’s systems through user accounts, and therefore Amazon was likely to succeed under theories derived from CFAA and California computer-access law.
From a pure CFAA perspective, the allegations were straightforward. Monopolist platform discovers a kind of automation that people who use the Internet enjoy, labels it “unauthorized,” cites to Power Ventures, points to investigative costs, and gets its injunction. It has happened before and it will happen again.
But the genuinely novel issue was totally ignored in the opinion. Perplexity’s Comet is an AI agent. And agentic AI is not merely collecting data. It is acting as the user’s delegated representative in an ongoing workflow.
The opinion makes zero effort to analyze:
whether an AI agent should be treated like a browser,
whether it should be treated like a human assistant using delegated credentials,
whether agency-law concepts matter,
whether user autonomy creates an independent authorization interest distinct from Power Ventures,
whether there is a meaningful distinction between scraping data and performing user-directed actions.
Instead, the court seems to jump directly to the conclusion that Amazon retains ultimate authority to exclude the intermediary.
(In partial defense of the court, they hint that they may have discussed this at oral arguments. But there’s no analysis...