A federal appeals court for the Ninth Circuit threw out the injunction Amazon had obtained against Perplexity's Comet browser assistant. Its reasoning under the federal anti-hacking statute: the person using the agent is the one who accesses the site, and the agent is just an instrument.
The decision leaves open whether agents violate a site's terms of service, and those contract claims go on. It does, however, shape how responsibility for an agent's actions is likely to be assigned.
Amazon has pushed back against several agents on its store, including Comet and ones from OpenAI and Google. In September it also blocked Meta's Muse.