In the wild
Amazon v. Perplexity: first federal appellate ruling on whether an AI shopping agent accessing a user account violates the CFAA
AIR-2025-0167 AIR record · 2026-08-amazon-perplexity-comet-cfaa
From the supporting source
Comet's AI agents had navigated through Amazon's password-protected pages, accessed users' private account information, and transmitted that data to Perplexity's serverstroutmanprivacy.com
The record
Disclosed
2025-11-04
Occurred
2025-11-01
Vendor
Perplexity AI
Product
Perplexity Comet browser / AI shopping assistant
Risk domain
Governance › Policy drift
Also touches
Privilege escalation
System type
Generative model
Who acted
Agent acted — the shopping agent logged in and purchased on the user's account
Attack surface
Browser agent
Autonomy level
Semi-autonomous
Initial vector
Agent logged into password protected user accounts on third party site
Impact type
Unauthorized access alleged, Legal precedent
Confidence
High
Submitted by
EAI Internal
Crosswalk
- OWASP Agentic Top 10 (2026)
- ASI01 – Agent Goal Hijack
- MITRE ATLAS
- AML.T0010 – AI Supply Chain Compromise
- NIST AI RMF
- GOVERN 1.5
- EU AI Act
- —
- ISO/IEC
- TR 24028; 23894
- AIUC-1
- E. Accountability
- Scope
- agent failure
- Mitigation
- Implement version pinning for models and prompts; Monitor for behavioral drift.
- Taxonomy
- Enkrypt AI agent risk taxonomy · Black-Box Red Teaming of Agentic AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Framework for Automated Risk Discovery
Blast radius
Amazon.com accounts of Comet users; sets CFAA precedent for all agentic browsers in the Ninth Circuit
Capability abused
Defense & remediation
Recorded defense
Amazon bot detection and terms of service; a 2024 agentic-shopping pause agreement
Guardrail kinds
Policy only
Guardrail outcome
Silent
Fix shipped
District court preliminary injunction (March 2026) vacated by the Ninth Circuit on 2026-08-04
Taxonomy & references
Curator notes
Amazon filed in the N.D. Cal. in November 2025 alleging CFAA and California CDAFA violations; the district court granted a preliminary injunction in March 2026; the Ninth Circuit unanimously vacated it on 2026-08-04, holding that it is the user who accesses Amazon's computers with the help of the Assistant. impact_realized set false: the alleged harm was contested and the appellate court found Amazon unlikely to succeed. Amazon says it disagrees and is evaluating next steps. Engadget's date for the filing (March 2026) conflicts with the November 2025 filing date given by the law-firm analysis; the latter is used.
Supporting sources
Cite as
Enkrypt AI. "Amazon v. Perplexity: first federal appellate ruling on whether an AI shopping agent accessing a user account violates the CFAA". AIR, AIR-2025-0167. https://agentincident.vercel.app/i/AIR-2025-0167/ (accessed 2026-10-19).