The Pulse
Amazon Adds New Claims to Perplexity’s Comet Lawsuit
Amazon filed an amended complaint accusing Perplexity’s Comet AI browser of disguising automated activity and accessing Amazon customer accounts without permission. The filing arrives weeks after the Ninth Circuit rejected Amazon’s prelimin
AI.info Team ·
Amazon has expanded its legal fight with Perplexity after a federal appeals court rejected the company’s first attempt to block Comet, accusing the AI browser of disguising automated activity as human browsing and reaching private customer accounts without permission.
The amended complaint, filed September 21 in federal court in California, adds allegations tied to Comet’s iOS version and renews Amazon’s claims under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California’s computer-access law. Amazon says Perplexity’s agent crossed technical and contractual boundaries even after repeated warnings.
“This case is not about stifling innovation; it is about unauthorized access and trespass.”
Amazon, in its amended complaint
Amazon Recasts the Fight Around Comet’s Architecture
The new filing gives Amazon a different theory from the one that the Ninth Circuit rejected in August. The appeals court held that, on the record before it, the user—not Perplexity—accessed Amazon’s computers when Comet’s Assistant operated through the user’s local browser.
Amazon now focuses on Comet for iOS, which it says uses a different setup. According to the amended complaint, the iOS version copies an Amazon session cookie to Perplexity’s cloud servers, where a virtual browser requests pages from Amazon directly. The complaint states that “no user device touches Amazon’s servers.”
That allegation matters because Perplexity told the appeals court that no Perplexity computer directly accessed an Amazon computer. Amazon says the iOS system contradicts that representation and gives the company a direct role in the disputed access.
The Ninth Circuit Narrowed Amazon’s First Theory
Amazon filed its original lawsuit in November 2025, alleging that Perplexity’s Comet browser violated the CFAA and California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act. A district judge granted Amazon a preliminary injunction in March 2026, finding that Amazon was likely to succeed on its claims involving access to password-protected accounts.
The Ninth Circuit vacated that injunction on August 4. In its opinion, the court said Comet’s Assistant was a tool and that the user accessed Amazon with the Assistant’s help. The panel wrote that “it is the user who ‘accesses’ Amazon’s computers,” while leaving open whether different facts could show Perplexity itself gained entry to Amazon’s systems.
The appeals court also said its decision did not resolve other possible claims, including tort claims. The panel limited its ruling to the CFAA and the California statute as applied to the system described in the existing record.
Amazon Says Comet Evaded Its Controls
Amazon’s amended complaint alleges that Comet presented itself as Google Chrome instead of identifying as an AI agent. Amazon’s terms require automated agents to identify themselves in their user-agent strings and prohibit them from evading technical measures designed to restrict or control access.
The company says Perplexity changed Comet after Amazon detected and blocked its activity. Amazon also alleges that Comet accessed customer accounts, collected account information and interfered with Amazon’s ability to distinguish automated traffic from human shopping.
Those allegations build on Amazon’s October 2025 cease-and-desist letter, which accused Perplexity of disguising Comet as Chrome and bypassing Amazon’s controls. In that letter, Amazon said it had previously asked Perplexity to stop undisclosed agent activity and identify Comet when operating in the Amazon Store.
Perplexity Has a Recent Appellate Win
Perplexity has already used the Ninth Circuit ruling to argue that Amazon’s original lawsuit fails under federal and California computer-access laws. In a September 11 filing described by MLex, Perplexity said the appeals decision undermined Amazon’s central claim that Perplexity—not the user—accessed Amazon’s systems.
The amended complaint attempts to separate the new iOS allegations from the browser-based activity examined by the appeals court. Amazon also adds a tortious-interference theory, according to the filing, giving the company another route that does not depend entirely on proving that Perplexity violated the CFAA.
Perplexity has not yet filed a public response to the amended complaint in the material reviewed for this report. Its earlier position was that Amazon was trying to prevent customers from using their own AI assistants while shopping on the site.
The Case Now Turns on Contracts and Cloud Access
The dispute has moved beyond whether an AI assistant can act through a user’s browser. Amazon’s amended claims ask whether an AI company can be held responsible when its own servers receive account credentials or session data and then request pages from a platform that has rejected the agent’s access.
The answer could determine whether Amazon’s Agent Terms function as a contractual boundary for automated shopping tools, rather than only as a technical instruction. Amazon permits some agentic features when they identify themselves and operate within rules set by the company, but it says Comet continued to conceal its identity and bypass restrictions.
The court must now assess whether the new allegations describe conduct materially different from the facts considered by the Ninth Circuit. That question—not the broader promise or threat of shopping agents—will decide whether Amazon’s amended case survives its next challenge.