On March 17, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled to stay the preliminary injunction previously issued by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Perplexity AI’s AI shopping assistant, Comet. This means that Comet may continue to operate on the Amazon platform and provide shopping agent services to users while the appeal is pending.

In late 2025, Amazon filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Perplexity AI’s AI shopping agent tool, Comet, used automated means to bypass Amazon’s technical safeguards without the platform’s authorization to scrape data such as product prices, inventory, and user reviews.

In March 2026, the court ruled in Amazon’s favor, issuing a preliminary injunction against Perplexity AI and ordering it to immediately cease using AI bots to access the Amazon website. Subsequently, Perplexity AI filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and requested a stay of the injunction pending the appeal.

Regarding this ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that, on the one hand, Perplexity AI’s legal arguments against the lower court’s injunction were substantively reasonable and not baseless; on the other hand, the panel determined that temporarily allowing the “Comet” AI shopping bot to continue operating on Amazon would not cause irreparable immediate harm to Amazon. Based on this, the court decided to suspend enforcement of the lower court’s preliminary injunction and maintain the current operational status until the appellate court issues a final ruling on the injunction’s legality.

The core dispute in this case lies in the legal boundaries of AI agents in internet commerce: Amazon argues that the platform has absolute control over its own data, and that Perplexity AI’s actions constitute illegal scraping that forcibly bypasses technical restrictions; Perplexity AI, however, argues that its “Comet” tool is designed to simplify the price comparison and shopping process for users, constitutes fair use of publicly available platform information, and does not impose an additional operational burden on Amazon’s servers.

As one of the world’s first landmark cases to rule on the legal status of AI agents, this case holds significant industry-wide implications.