Amazon says Perplexity's app contradicted what its lawyers told a federal appeals court

Amazon filed 41 pages the same day it blocked Muse

Muse users started hitting a wall on 20 September 2026: "continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's Conditions of Use" ¹². Amazon says the agent does not identify itself, appears to capture and store customer credentials, and scrapes account data ¹³. The quieter move was in court: on 21 September Amazon amended its San Francisco lawsuit against Perplexity↗, pleading computer fraud, California's computer data access statute and tortious interference across 41 pages ⁴⁹.

The new material targets Comet for iOS, launched 18 March 2026. A district court had enjoined the earlier Comet on 9 March, after Amazon sued that month ⁴⁹. On iOS, the filing alleges, the app copies the user's Amazon session cookie to Perplexity's cloud, where a virtual browser requests Amazon pages directly: "No user device touches Amazon's servers" ⁴.

The ruling the complaint is built to flip

That sentence is aimed at the opinion of 4 August 2026↗. The Ninth Circuit vacated Amazon's preliminary injunction because, on the record before it, the user's browser talked to Amazon while Perplexity processed screenshots; the user, not the company, was doing the "accessing" under federal anti-hacking law ⁵. The panel called the Assistant "a tool, not a person", limited its holding to that record, and pointed to Amazon's terms of service ⁶.

Rehearing was denied on 10 September↗ ¹. If no user device sits in the middle, that premise is gone, and that is the engineering point.

What Amazon says its engineers watched

Perplexity's briefs of 1 April and 6 May represented that "no Perplexity computer ever has direct access to an Amazon computer" ⁴. Amazon alleges its engineers logged exactly that traffic every day from 18 March to at least 11 May; that its counsel demanded page-by-page corrections on 6 May; and that Perplexity repeated the statements in a reply brief filed later that day, then switched the iOS feature off on 11 May as "a measure of good-faith" ⁴.

The ledger attached: damages beyond $260,000, eight members of its traffic engineering team, 1,280 hours since July 2025, and at least 185,712 Comet sessions on Amazon.com by 15 June ⁴. Every figure is Amazon's allegation; Perplexity has not filed a response to the amended complaint ⁴.

Perplexity's answer, so far

Its public position, quoted in Amazon's own filing, is that Amazon is "demanding we prohibit Comet users from using their AI assistants on Amazon" ⁴. In November 2025 it called Amazon's cease-and-desist↗ "an aggressive legal threat" from a company "more interested in serving you ads, sponsored results, and influencing your purchasing decisions" ⁷. Amazon booked more than $68 billion in advertising revenue in 2025 ¹.

Amazon is not against agents as such: its Buy for Me feature shops external brand sites, identifies itself, and lets brands opt out ¹.

The contract door the court left open

The Muse popup accuses nobody of hacking. It cites Conditions of Use amended on 30 May 2025 to require agents to identify themselves as "Agent/[agent name]" ⁴⁸. The complaint says Comet sends Google Chrome's user-agent string and changed it each time Amazon learned to detect it, conduct Cloudflare flagged in August 2025 before removing Perplexity from its verified operators ⁴.

The popup, the ruling's invitation and the complaint run through one door: the Agent Terms Amazon wrote on 30 May 2025, a contract moat the Ninth Circuit itself pointed to when it noted Amazon may regulate access through private terms of service ⁶. Amazon said on 4 August it was "confident in our case" and evaluating next steps; the amended complaint is one ⁹.

The docket now carries a single question: whether Perplexity's servers were where its lawyers told a federal court they were not.