The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a district court preliminary injunction against Perplexity AI on August 4, 2026, in Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, No. 26-1444. Amazon had sought to restrict Perplexity's AI agent from accessing data on its platform, arguing the access violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030. The panel found Amazon unlikely to prevail on the merits and lifted the injunction.
Section 1030(a)(2) of the CFAA prohibits intentional unauthorized access to a protected computer and the obtaining of information from it. The Ninth Circuit applied the Supreme Court's limiting construction from Van Buren v. United States, 593 U.S. 374 (2021), under which CFAA liability requires a defendant to access the victim's own computer system. Perplexity demonstrated that Amazon data reached its servers only after first passing through the requesting user's device. The panel found that sequence dispositive: Perplexity did not directly query Amazon's infrastructure.
AI search and retrieval products that aggregate publicly accessible web content may cite this ruling to resist CFAA claims. Operators can argue that receiving data relayed via a user's browser does not constitute unauthorized server access absent evidence of direct computer intrusion. Website operators who want to restrict AI indexing cannot rely on the CFAA alone; they must depend on enforceable contractual terms of service and technical access controls, including authentication gates or CAPTCHA systems.
The ruling is a preliminary injunction decision, not a final merits judgment. Amazon may still litigate its CFAA claims to trial. The panel did not address AI agents that bypass login barriers or circumvent rate-limiting controls, which present materially different facts under the statute's exceeds-authorized-access prong. Whether other circuits will follow this reasoning remains open; the Second and Fifth Circuits have addressed CFAA access questions on narrower records.
Licentium advises on AI-related regulatory and commercial legal matters and maintains a partner network for matters requiring local counsel. To discuss how this ruling affects your AI product or data acquisition strategy, contact us at contact@licentium.io. Work we undertake includes: AI agent compliance, CFAA exposure analysis, data licensing and acquisition agreements, web scraping terms of service disputes, and platform regulatory strategy.
Source: Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, No. 26-1444 (9th Cir. Aug. 4, 2026)