On August 4, the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction Amazon had won against Perplexity''s Comet browser. The reasoning is the part builders should care about. The court held that when an agentic browser logs into Amazon and buys something, it is the user who accessed Amazon, not Perplexity. The user''s browser visits the site. Perplexity''s servers receive what the user sends. That architectural distinction put the activity outside the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the federal anti-hacking law Amazon had leaned on.
This is a preliminary ruling, not a final word, and it is one circuit. But it lands right in the middle of a question every team building agents is about to hit: when software acts on a person''s behalf, who is doing the accessing?
Why this matters if you build agents
If you are shipping anything that browses, logs in, or buys on a user''s behalf, the ruling is a signal about how to architect it. The agents that came out looking clean here act as the user. They use the user''s session, the user''s credentials, the user''s intent. They do not sit on a server somewhere scraping a site under their own identity and reselling access.
That distinction is worth designing around on purpose. Route the actual requests through the user''s authenticated context. Keep a clear record that the user initiated and authorized the action. Do not dress up a centralized scraper as an "agent" and assume the same logic protects you, because it probably will not.
And read the CFAA win narrowly. The court said building a browser that follows a user''s instructions is not hacking. It did not say platforms have to let you in. Terms of service, contract claims, and plain technical blocking are all still live. A green light on the anti-hacking statute is not a green light on everything.
Why this matters if you run the site
Flip it around. If you operate a store or an app, agents are going to show up as your users, because legally that is now closer to what they are. Betting on a hacking statute to keep them out looks weak after this ruling. Your real controls are the ones you actually build: bot detection, rate limits, authentication, and terms you are willing to enforce.
There is a product decision hiding in here too. Agent traffic that completes a purchase is still a sale. Treat every session like it might be a human working through a piece of software, and ask whether your checkout, your structured data, and your APIs make that easy or painful. The teams that win agentic commerce will be the ones whose sites are pleasant for an agent to complete a task on, not the ones filing lawsuits about it.
The takeaway
The law is starting to treat the user, not the tool, as the one taking the action. Build like that is true. If you make agents, make them act as the person who asked. If you run a site, defend it with engineering and contracts, not with the hope that a court calls a browser a hacker.
None of this is settled, and the ruling could narrow on appeal. But the direction is clear enough to design for today.
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