AgentReady at agentready.market, operated by Villepinte Studio — the e-commerce transaction audit. Unaffiliated with other AgentReady-named products.

Short answer: the legal door is shut, at least in the Ninth Circuit. On Thursday, September 10, 2026, the court declined Amazon’s petition to rehear Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc. en banc, leaving in place the August 4 panel ruling that a user-directed AI shopping agent does not “access” a merchant’s computers under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Courthouse News: “No 9th Circuit rehearing in Amazon-Perplexity case”; MediaPost: “Appeals Court Again Rejects Amazon Bid To Block Perplexity”). A merchant who wants to keep a shopping agent off a store now has exactly one kind of lever left: a technical one. And five days later, on September 15, Cloudflare starts pulling that lever by default for a large share of stores.

What happened

We covered Amazon’s petition when it was filed in August: Amazon asked the full Ninth Circuit to take back the case from the three-judge panel and reverse it, arguing the panel had applied the wrong standard of review in an area with little case law. Per Courthouse News, the court declined. Its own framing, as reported, is telling: not one active judge “requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter.” That is not a close call that went against Amazon. It is a petition that never reached a vote.

MediaPost’s account records what Amazon had argued and lost: that Perplexity itself accesses Amazon’s site, because “the assistant will access Amazon regardless, acting under Perplexity’s control.” The panel had rejected that reading, holding that it is the user who accesses Amazon’s computers with the help of the Assistant, and the full court saw no reason to revisit it.

What is now settled

Inside the Ninth Circuit, which includes California and therefore most of the venues where platform-versus-agent disputes get filed, the panel opinion is the law: an AI agent operating on a logged-in user’s instructions is a tool the user wields, not an independent visitor a merchant can lock out with a 1986 anti-hacking statute. The original ruling is no longer an “opening ruling” waiting on review. It is the only circuit-level answer to the question, and it has now survived the one review the circuit itself could give it.

For a merchant, the practical consequence is blunt. A cease-and-desist letter that leans on the CFAA to keep a user’s shopping agent out of an account has lost its teeth in the Ninth Circuit. Terms of service can still say what they like about automated access, and the trademark and “concealed agent” claims discussed below are still alive, but the statute that made the threat credible is off the table for user-directed agents.

What is not settled

Three things remain open, and it is worth being precise about them because each one points at a different piece of merchant infrastructure.

  • The remand. The CFAA and California CDAFA theories are what the appeal decided. Amazon’s trademark and state-law claims go back to the district court (N.D. Cal. No. 3:25-cv-09514). The most interesting of these is the concealment theory: not “may an agent come in,” but “may an agent come in while presenting itself as a human browser.” If that theory gains ground, the pressure moves from blocking agents to making them identify themselves, which is exactly what Web Bot Auth and declared crawler categories exist to do.
  • The Supreme Court. Amazon can still petition for certiorari. No filing has been reported as of this writing, and with no other circuit having ruled on the question there is no circuit split for the Court to resolve, which makes a grant unlikely in the near term. It is the next escalation point to watch, not a reason to wait.
  • Technical blocks. Nothing in either the panel opinion or the rehearing denial touches a site’s right to block traffic by technical means. Robots directives, WAF rules, bot-management classes and CAPTCHAs are all as legal as they were. The ruling narrows what a merchant can sue over, not what a merchant can configure.

Why September 15 changes the weight of this

That last point is where the calendar matters. The court closed the legal route on September 10. On September 15, Cloudflare changes its AI-traffic defaults: the Agent and Training bot classes are blocked by default on ad-carrying pages of newly onboarded domains, and the legacy “Block AI Bots” setting begins to catch multi-purpose crawlers by their most restrictive behaviour (what changes and the checklist). The Agent class is the one that shops: ChatGPT or Perplexity fetching a product page to finish a purchase for a live buyer.

Put the two together and blocking an AI shopping agent is now purely a technical choice, and for many stores it is a choice about to be made by a default rather than by the owner. A merchant who never wanted to block agents can find themselves doing it by accident; a merchant who did want to block them has just been told the only tool that works is the one in the Cloudflare dashboard, not the one in the legal department. We are measuring what the flip actually does to Cloudflare-fronted stores, with the method fixed before the data existed.

What a merchant should do now

  • Decide on purpose. Whether agents may shop on your store is now a configuration decision. Make it deliberately, in Security → Bots on Cloudflare or the equivalent on your CDN, rather than inheriting it from a default.
  • Check from the outside. Dashboards describe intent; only an outside request under an agent user-agent shows what a shopping agent actually gets. The access pillar of an AgentReady audit does exactly that fetch.
  • Prefer identification to exclusion. The surviving claims on remand are about agents pretending to be humans. Requiring agents to sign their requests, and verifying those signatures, is the posture that holds up whichever way the remand goes, and it lets you allow the agent that buys while refusing the scraper that doesn’t.

FAQ

Is the Amazon v. Perplexity CFAA ruling final now?

Within the Ninth Circuit, yes, for practical purposes. The panel’s August 4, 2026 opinion stands, and the full court declined on September 10 to rehear it. Amazon could still ask the Supreme Court to take the case, but no such petition has been reported, and the underlying district court case continues on other claims.

Can a merchant still block AI shopping agents?

Technically, yes. The ruling only removes the CFAA as a way to punish a user-directed agent for entering a logged-in area. Robots directives, bot-management rules, signature requirements such as Web Bot Auth and CAPTCHAs are untouched. What changed is that the technical layer is now the only layer that blocks.

Does this ruling apply outside the Ninth Circuit?

Not as binding precedent. Other circuits are free to rule differently, and a conflicting ruling elsewhere would be the most likely route back to the Supreme Court. Until one exists, this is the only appellate answer on the record, and courts elsewhere will read it.

Sources

The courts have finished saying who is allowed to send an agent to your store. Whether that agent can find, understand and buy anything once it arrives is the part no court was ever going to decide for you.