Short answer: no, it isn’t over. The Ninth Circuit’s August 4, 2026 ruling that a user-directed AI shopping agent doesn’t “access” a merchant’s computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — the first appellate word on that question — is not final law. Amazon has asked the full, en banc Ninth Circuit to rehear the case and reverse the panel, according to an August 20, 2026 report from the legal newswire Mealey’s (Amazon Asks Ninth Circuit For En Banc Review Of Agentic AI Injunction Ruling). Anyone using the August ruling as settled precedent for how to treat agentic traffic is reading a case that’s still being litigated.

What changed

This log covered the original ruling when a three-judge panel vacated Amazon’s preliminary injunction against Perplexity’s Comet browser, holding that the user who directs an AI shopping agent — not Perplexity — is the one who “accesses” Amazon’s servers. That panel opinion is still what a federal appeals court has said on the record. But per Mealey’s dateline, Amazon has now filed a formal petition asking the full Ninth Circuit to take the case back up and rule the other way.

Mealey’s quotes Amazon’s own framing of the ask: the en banc court should step in “to ensure that a ruling applying the improper standard of review does not ‘occupy the field’” in a legal area — AI agents and anti-hacking law — with “little case law.” The petition specifically targets an injunction that had barred an agentic tool from accessing “password-protected areas of Amazon.com.”

What an en banc petition actually does

Filing the petition doesn’t undo the ruling by itself. The August 4 opinion stands as the law of the case unless and until the en banc court — a larger panel of Ninth Circuit judges — agrees to rehear it and issues a different result. Rehearing en banc is discretionary and relatively rare, typically granted only for questions of exceptional importance or to resolve a conflict in the circuit’s own case law, which is exactly the “little case law” argument Amazon is making to clear that bar.

Whatever the en banc court decides, the underlying dispute keeps moving regardless: the district court case (Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., N.D. Cal. No. 3:25-cv-09514) resumed after the panel ruling — the docket shows case-management activity through August 20, 2026, including an order terminating motions — and Amazon’s trademark and state-law claims were never part of the CFAA appeal to begin with.

What this means for a merchant

Nothing changes today, and that’s the point. A store that read the August panel opinion as a green light to stop worrying about CFAA-based leverage over agentic traffic is acting on a ruling the losing party is actively asking a full appellate court to undo. Our original coverage holds even more now that the legal question is unsettled twice over: contractual and technical controls — terms of service, robots directives, Web Bot Auth signature verification — are the layer a merchant actually controls, and none of them wait on how a 1986 statute gets interpreted for AI agents.

FAQ

Is the Perplexity CFAA ruling still in effect?

Yes. The Ninth Circuit panel’s August 4, 2026 opinion vacating Amazon’s injunction remains the operative appellate ruling. Amazon’s petition asks the full court to rehear and reverse it, but filing a petition doesn’t stay or undo the panel’s decision on its own — that only happens if en banc review is granted and decided in Amazon’s favor.

What does “en banc” review mean?

“En banc” means a case is reheard by a larger panel of a court’s judges instead of the usual three-judge panel that first decided it. Federal circuit courts grant en banc review sparingly, generally reserving it for cases involving an exceptionally important legal question or a conflict between the panel’s ruling and the circuit’s existing precedent.

Should merchants change their AI-agent access policy because of this appeal?

Not because of the appeal itself — there’s no new ruling to act on yet, and the case could take months to resolve either way. The more durable move is the one that doesn’t depend on the outcome: pair your terms of service with technical enforcement (bot detection, Web Bot Auth signatures) rather than relying on a still-contested reading of federal anti-hacking law to do the gating for you.

Sources

The court fight over who’s even allowed to send an agent to your store is still live — which is a separate question from whether an agent that gets in can find, understand and buy anything once it’s there.