An amended complaint, and an accusation
Amazon filed a 41-page amended complaint against Perplexity on Monday accusing the AI company of misleading a federal appeals court. The claim is specific: that between March and May 2026, Perplexity’s Comet browser for iOS copied users’ Amazon session cookies to Perplexity’s own servers, while Perplexity was telling the Ninth Circuit that “no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer”, The Next Web reported.
Why that sentence carries weight
The Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon’s preliminary injunction against Comet on 4 August on very close to that distinction. The panel held that when a user directs Perplexity’s assistant to do something on Amazon.com, it is the user, and not Perplexity, who is accessing Amazon’s computers, with the assistant acting as a tool.
The court acknowledged that screenshots travel from the user’s browser to Perplexity’s servers and that instructions come back. It held those exchanges did not amount to Perplexity itself gaining entry to Amazon’s systems, and found Amazon unlikely to succeed on its Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claim.
A session cookie is not a screenshot. It is the credential that keeps a shopper logged in, and a copy of it on a company’s servers is a harder fact to characterise as a user simply using a tool.
The numbers in the filing
Amazon says it counted 185,712 Comet sessions on its platform, and that its engineering team spent more than 1,280 hours dealing with the agent.
How the case got here
Amazon sued Perplexity in November 2025, arguing that Comet broke its conditions of use, degraded the shopping experience and created privacy risks. A district court granted a preliminary injunction in March 2026. Perplexity appealed, and won in August — a ruling that narrowed the reach of the anti-hacking statute for AI agents generally, not only for Comet.
A busy Monday for Amazon’s lawyers
The same day, Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse assistant from Amazon.com, telling users that continued access by an unauthorised AI agent violates its conditions of use. That action rests on contract rather than on the hacking statute the Ninth Circuit has just trimmed.
What to watch
Whether the district court treats the cookie allegation as a factual dispute that changes the analysis the appeals court performed, and whether the Ninth Circuit is eventually asked to revisit a published opinion on facts Amazon now says were misstated to it. Either outcome would move the line on what an agent may do on somebody else’s website.
