In March 2026, a federal court issued a preliminary injunction in Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., finding that an AI shopping agent may have violated federal hacking law — even though the user had expressly authorized the agent to act. The court held that user permission does not override a merchant’s express prohibition. The AI agent’s access was “unauthorized” as a matter of law regardless of what the user intended.
That ruling is a preview of the legal architecture problem that agentic commerce creates. Commerce law was built for human actors making conscious decisions. AI agents that browse, negotiate, select, and pay on a user’s behalf break every assumption it rests on — and the law has not caught up.
