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The first major 'Agentic AI' showdown. Amazon accuses Perplexity of using its AI agent to bypass security and 'trespass' on Amazon's digital property.
Filed in late 2025 in the Northern District of California (Case No. 3:25-cv-09514), this case is the first major "Agentic AI" showdown. Amazon has accused the AI search engine Perplexity of using its "Comet" agent to bypass security and "trespass" on Amazon's digital property.
The case hinges on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Amazon alleges that Perplexity didn't just crawl the web; it intentionally masked its identity to ignore "robots.txt" files—the digital "No Trespassing" signs of the internet.
Amazon's docket includes evidence that Perplexity's agents allegedly rotated IP addresses and mimicked human behavior to scrape pricing data and reviews without authorization.
Perplexity characterizes the lawsuit as an "exclusionary tactic" by a legacy giant. They argue that their agents are simply "high-speed browsers" performing the same actions a human user would, and thus cannot be guilty of "unauthorized access."
As of February 2026, a motion for a preliminary injunction is pending. The ruling will determine if "AI Agents" have a right to the open web or if websites can legally "wall off" their data from the bots that power the next generation of search.
Use PacerPlus to search the actual court documents from this case.