US appeals court: an AI agent is a tool, not a trespasser

On 4 August 2026 the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated the injunction that had blocked Perplexity's Comet assistant from logging into Amazon accounts on a user's behalf, in Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI (No. 26-1444). The lower court had granted that injunction on 9 March 2026. The reasoning matters more than the outcome. Amazon had argued that Perplexity gained unauthorised access to its servers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the 1986 anti-hacking statute. The appeals court disagreed on who was doing the accessing: the assistant is a tool, not a person for statutory purposes, and it is the user, logging in with their own credentials, who reaches Amazon's servers. The panel acknowledged there is "little to no existing caselaw directly dealing with how to ascribe responsibility for AI agents", let alone under the CFAA, and applied the rule of lenity — where a criminal statute is ambiguous, it is read narrowly. This is the first appellate answer to a question every agentic product now runs into: when software acts on your behalf inside your own account, is that you or the vendor knocking on the door. The answer here is "you". Amazon's trademark and state-law claims survive, so the dispute is not over, and a decision from one circuit does not settle the country — but automation vendors now have something to point at. wujec.ai does not yet have a profile for Perplexity or its Comet browser assistant; that gap is on our list.