• by Wendy Davis , March 13, 2026

Perplexity is urging a federal appellate court to immediately lift an order banning the shopping agent Comet from Amazon.

"Enjoining the use of Perplexity’s signature product on one of the internet’s most important websites would cause devastating harm to the company and consumers alike," the artificial intelligence company writes in an emergency motion filed late Thursday with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Allowing the product to remain in use during the appeal, by contrast, would inflict no meaningful harm on Amazon, which failed to identify any cognizable injury during the roughly eight months that Perplexity’s product has been on the market," the company adds.

The request comes several days after U.S. District Court Judge Maxine Chesney in the Northern District of California granted Amazon's request for an order prohibiting Perplexity's shopping agent from continuing to access the retailer's site, and ordered the artificial intelligence company to destroy data obtained by Comet.

Chesney said in a March 9 ruling that Amazon would likely prevail with its claim that Perplexity violated a 40-year-old federal anti-hacking law by accessing Amazon.com without its authorization. She wrote that Amazon provided "strong evidence" that Perplexity's Comet browser access the site with users' consent -- but without authorization by Amazon.

Chesney stayed the injunction until March 16 to give Perplexity the opportunity to appeal to the 9th Circuit.

Perplexity argues in its emergency request that Chesney misinterpreted the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That law, introduced soon after the movie "War Games" came out, prohibits anyone from accessing web servers without authorization.

Among other arguments, Perplexity says its browser doesn't "access" Amazon for purposes of the anti-hacking law. Instead, Perplexity argues, consumers are the ones who access the retailer's servers.

"At bottom, the only relevant access to Amazon’s servers was by users of the Comet browser -- not by Perplexity," the company argues.

"Those users did not share with Perplexity any private information other than their own. And Amazon has not suffered any cognizable loss -- if anything, it benefited -- from Perplexity assisting customer purchases from Amazon at the customers’ express direction," Perplexity writes.

Perplexity also argues that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act doesn't apply to publicly accessible websites like Amazon.

The artificial intelligence company points to a prior high-profile battle over the anti-hacking law between the social platform LinkedIn and analytics company hiQ Labs. LinkedIn argued that hiQ Labs violated the anti-hacking statute by scraping users' profiles without authorization, but the 9th Circuit indicated in 2022 that LinkedIn probably couldn't prove that claim because profiles on its website were publicly available. (A district court judge ultimately decided that hiQ violated LinkedIn's terms of service by scraping; hiQ then agreed to pay $500,000 to settle the dispute.)

Perplexity has asked the 9th Circuit to issue a decision on the emergency request by March 16.