When Can Amazon Block an Agentic AI Service?–Amazon v. Perplexity (Guest Blog Post)

by guest blogger Kieran McCarthy On March 9, 2026, Judge Chesney granted a preliminary injunction in the case of Amazon v. Perplexity, concluding Amazon was likely to succeed on its CFAA and California Penal Code section 502 theories. If you’re familiar with the CFAA, the outcome of the preliminary injunction opinion was what you might expect. But it is underwhelming in some new and interesting ways. It is, in my opinion, a shockingly poor effort to grapple with CFAA applicability to agentic AI technology after Van Buren. If you’re unfamiliar, agentic AI is simply the name for AI that actually does work for you instead of answering questions. An agent can take a loose goal, break it into steps, use tools, gather information, make decisions, and come back with the task done. That makes it useful for the work people hate but still need judgment to finish, such as research, product comparisons, customer support, and multi-step coordination. One valuable use case for agentic AI is…