Ninth Circuit Vacates CFAA Injunction Against Perplexity's Comet AI Agent
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ("the Ninth Circuit") vacated a preliminary injunction against Perplexity AI, holding that Perplexity's artificial intelligence ("AI") agent acting at a user's direction does not independently "access" a computer system under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") or California's analogous statute.
Background
In a prior Alert, we described how a federal court entered a preliminary injunction after finding that Perplexity AI's agentic browser "Comet" likely violated the CFAA by accessing Amazon's systems without authorization after receiving a cease-and-desist letter, extending the Power Ventures framework to AI agents for the first time.
Computer System Access
On August 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit vacated the preliminary injunction. Writing for the panel, Judge Milan D. Smith Jr., concluded that, based on the record before the court, it is the user—not Perplexity—who "accesses" Amazon's computers for CFAA purposes. The court's reasoning turned on how Perplexity's Comet agent actually functions: a user directs the agent through their own browser; the browser communicates with Amazon's servers while the agent takes screenshots of the browser view, sends them to Perplexity's servers for processing, and receives navigation instructions in return. At no point do Perplexity's servers directly communicate with Amazon's servers. Because the CFAA applies to "[w]hoever … intentionally accesses" a protected computer—language contemplating access by a person, not an AI tool—the court held that the user, not Perplexity, is the party who "accesses" the system. The panel also invoked the rule of lenity, reasoning that imposing liability on Perplexity would require a novel interpretation far afield from the statute's anti-hacking purpose and could expose individual users to criminal liability. The panel reached the same conclusion under the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act ("CDAFA").
Significance
The opinion is the first appellate decision addressing how computer-access statutes apply to agentic AI. The court expressly limited its holding to the current record and acknowledged that the legal understanding of agentic AI will change as the technology evolves.
Companies deploying AI agents should evaluate this decision alongside their compliance strategies, while platform operators may need to rely on alternative enforcement mechanisms, including terms of service restrictions and technological measures, to regulate third-party AI access to their systems.
