Judge Maxine Chesney granted Amazon its preliminary injunction on March 10. The Ninth Circuit paused it about a week later. Perplexity filed its appellate brief on May 8. Oral arguments happened on June 11 in Seattle. And then everyone went home, and nothing has happened since. It is July 12. That is thirty-one days of silence from a panel that got asked the question every AI product manager in the country cares about, which is: can an AI agent log into my customer’s account, on my customer’s behalf, and do the thing my customer told it to do, without me being sued into a federal prison.
The specific question in front of the court is narrow and boring. Does Perplexity’s Comet browser, when it logs into a user’s Amazon account and buys something with the user’s own credentials, violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 statute originally written to punish teenagers who dialed into mainframes. The answer to that narrow, boring question decides whether a $20 billion product category shipping in 2026 is a felony.
Perplexity’s brief is elegant, in the way that briefs get when the alternative is losing a company. The argument is that the CFAA regulates unauthorized access, that authorization runs from the account holder (the user), not from the site owner (Amazon), and that treating a robot logging in with valid credentials as “unauthorized” is a category error. In plain English: I told the robot my password. The robot used my password. The robot is me. Amazon does not get to argue that some customers count more than others because those customers have a bot in the front seat.
Amazon’s argument is the opposite and arguably worse for civilization. Amazon says: we did not authorize the bot. We only authorized the human. The bot pretending to be the human is a kind of trespass. This theory, if the Ninth Circuit blesses it, ends agentic commerce as anyone is currently pitching it, because every retailer with a login page becomes a fortress against AI agents by default, and every AI agent has to go begging site by site for permission that no retailer has any commercial reason to grant.
The Buy with Pro angle makes the stakes weirder. Perplexity’s own checkout, powered by a PayPal partnership since November 2025, is not the thing at trial. Comet using the user’s Amazon login is the thing at trial. But if the Ninth Circuit affirms, the incentive that pops out the other side is: Perplexity abandons the third-party site login model and pushes users into first-party checkout, because first-party checkout does not require pretending to be a human. The unintended consequence of siding with Amazon might be that every agentic browser stops using Amazon and instead builds its own storefront and its own payment rail. Which is not, presumably, what Amazon actually wants.
Perplexity is not standing still. Comet on iOS shipped in March. The enterprise version, Comet Assistant, is live for corporate customers doing multi-step tasks (booking flights, filling forms, managing inboxes) that are structurally the same thing as Comet buying you a phone case. If the Ninth Circuit affirms, none of those enterprise deployments are safe either, because every enterprise SaaS tool has a terms-of-service clause that reads like Amazon’s. The scope of the ruling escapes shopping instantly.
The silence is telling. Thirty-one days is not the outer envelope for a Ninth Circuit ruling by any means. Panels sit on hard cases for six months, twelve months, longer. But the reason the silence hurts is that everyone else is shipping into the ambiguity. OpenAI’s Deployment Company is buying forward-deployed engineers to build enterprise agents. Microsoft’s Frontier Company is doing the same. Anthropic’s skills system, the Salesforce Agentforce GA, the ServiceNow Project Arc partnership: every one of them ships agentic actions into third-party systems, and every one of them is one bad Ninth Circuit paragraph away from having to rewrite their trust and safety docs.
If the panel affirms, watch what Google does. Google has a browser (Chrome), an AI (Gemini), and a shopping surface (Google Shopping). It is one product update from being agentic commerce’s home team. If the panel reverses, watch what Amazon does. Amazon does not sit still after losing. Amazon builds Rufus 2 and files new suits under new theories and starts adding CAPTCHAs that specifically defeat Comet, and the arms race becomes a browser war fought in HTML forms.
Either way, the tell is that Perplexity kept shipping through the appeal. The company raised another $200 million in June, specifically to fund Comet. That is not the behavior of a company that thinks the appeal is a coin flip. That is the behavior of a company that has read the room. The room being that everybody who ever authorized a machine to type on their behalf, including the entire enterprise software industry, is watching Seattle.
Thirty-one days. Every silent Friday makes the roadmap more expensive.