Web Scraping Digest: 9th Circuit Addresses Agentic AI

Courts have spent years working through how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) applies to web scraping, including whether access to a website occurs “without authorization.” In Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., the Ninth Circuit addressed that familiar CFAA claim, but in connection with a novel technology, agentic AI. Rather than focusing on whether Perplexity, as an entity, had authorization to access Amazon’s site, the court addressed whose technology “accesses” Amazon’s computers. The court found that individual Perplexity users, rather than Perplexity as a company, “accessed” Amazon.com. In doing so, the court vacated a preliminary injunction that prohibited Perplexity from enabling its users to use Perplexity’s AI-powered browser to interact with Amazon.