Appeals court temporarily lets Perplexity keep its Comet shopping bots running on Amazon

Perplexity has temporarily avoided having its Comet shopping agent blocked on Amazon after a US appeals court paused a tougher ruling from a lower court. This is not a win on the merits for the company. It is a breather that lets the service keep running while the dispute continues.

What the court decided

On the eve of the injunction taking effect, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granted Perplexity an administrative stay. That means the preliminary injunction, which would have halted Comet's operation inside Amazon, does not take effect for now. The court did not say Perplexity is ultimately right; it only froze enforcement of the lower court's ruling until it considers further motions.

Before that, on March 9, 2026, a federal court in the Northern District of California sided with Amazon. Judge Maxine Chesney found that Amazon had made a strong case that Comet accesses protected areas of the site with the user's permission but without permission from the platform itself. Separately, the court said Amazon is likely to be able to prove violations of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California's law against unauthorized access to data.

"With the user's permission, but without

Amazon's permission."

What the dispute is about

At the heart of the conflict is the question of who actually controls what an AI agent does inside a user's account.

Amazon sued Perplexity back in November 2025. The retailer's position boils down to this: Comet doesn't just open public pages. It enters protected account areas, runs automated scripts, disguises that activity as ordinary browsing, and ignores direct demands to stop accessing the site.

Perplexity tells a different story. According to the company, Comet works as a browser assistant inside the user's session: the person launches the agent, logs in, and approves key actions themselves. In court filings, Perplexity also claimed that logins, payment details, and activity history are not sent to its servers but are stored locally on the user's device.

That leads to the startup's main argument: if users have the right to hand a task to their browser, the platform should not get monopoly control over which tool they use to do it.

The dispute quickly grew beyond a single Comet feature. In effect, the courts are now testing whether user consent is enough for an AI agent to operate, or whether a service also needs separate permission from the platform itself. For the entire agentic commerce category, this is one of the first major stress tests.

What the injunction covered

Had the March 9 ruling taken effect without a pause, Perplexity would have had to sharply restrict Comet's operation on Amazon.

The preliminary injunction included several specific requirements:

• a ban on accessing Amazon's protected systems using AI agents;
• a ban on using, creating, or taking over Amazon accounts to run such agents;
• a requirement to destroy copies of Amazon data, including user data obtained through Comet;
• an obligation to notify employees and contractors of the injunction and then report on compliance.

For Perplexity, this would have been a painful blow not just to one feature but to its entire strategy around Comet. In its court filings, the company warned it would lose its first-mover advantage in AI shopping, some of its market share, and the ability to rapidly improve the product on real-world use cases. It even asked the court to require Amazon to post a bond of at least $1 billion in case the injunction proved wrongful, but the court rejected that request.

So far, the appeals court has given the company only a short breather. That's an important nuance: the injunction has not been overturned. It has been temporarily paused while the court considers Perplexity's broader request to stay the ruling for the duration of the appeal.

What it means

Amazon v. Perplexity is shaping up to be one of the first major lawsuits that turns not on ordinary web scraping but on whether AI agents have the right to act inside user accounts.

If the courts ultimately side with Amazon, large platforms will gain a strong argument for restricting third-party shopping agents. If Perplexity prevails, users will be able to delegate purchases and other routine online tasks to their browsers far more freely.