In AI Fight With Amazon, Quinn Emanuel Wins Critical Ruling for Client Perplexity

Quinn Emanuel won a significant ruling at the frontier of agentic artificial intelligence, as a federal appeals panel shot down a lower-court order barring Perplexity’s AI agent from shopping for customers on Amazon.

The panel on Aug. 4 vacated the preliminary injunction, which Amazon.com Services had won in March after alleging violations of the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and a similar California law. The order was to temporarily ban Perplexity from deploying its agentic tool on Amazon.com.

The ruling comes as the broader AI industry is using such agents to show progress amid data center and model development expenditures that have anxious investors looking for the payoff. Although the appeals panel cautioned that it wasn’t setting out general guidelines for agentic AI, its rejection of the ban is an important win for Perplexity that will help shape the case as it returns to the district court, and will have wide implications for the burgeoning technology.

“The panel correctly recognized that a user directing an AI agent is a user exercising choice, not a third party gaining unauthorized access,” said Quinn Emanuel Chairman and Founding Partner John B. Quinn, whose argument against the injunction at the district court was vindicated by the appeals court opinion. “We're confident in our position as the case continues.”

High Stakes

The injunction against our client was a huge problem. Perplexity’s flagship agentic AI tool would be barred from accessing the most popular e-commerce site in the world. But it’s just when the stakes are so high that companies turn to Quinn Emanuel.

The three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the lower court had erred in granting the injunction because Amazon was unlikely to succeed on the merits of its claims. The panel found that it wasn’t Perplexity that accessed Amazon’s servers, but the users who set the agent to work shopping for them. However sophisticated, the agent “is a tool, not a person, for statutory purposes,” the panel said. 

It sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings consistent with its opinion. Because we secured stays along the way, the ban never went into effect.

Nationwide Legal Team

In addition to John Quinn, our nationwide team featured Daniel Posner, Andy Schapiro, Renita Sharma, Will Pilon, Luke Hammill, Jonathan Kim, Rex Alley, Trish Goforth, and now-former partner Chris Michel. 

The dispute began in November, when Amazon sued Perplexity, claiming it was secretly accessing its customer ‌accounts through the agent – which can log on for users, comparison-shop, and place orders – and presenting a data security risk. Responding in a filing, Perplexity said the lawsuit was a transparent effort to place Amazon's business model above users' convenience.

The real reason for the suit, Perplexity suggested, was that “AI agents don’t have eyeballs to see the pervasive advertising Amazon bombards its users with.”

Amazon happens to be developing its own agentic AI tool that will compete with Perplexity’s.