A federal appeals court has handed the artificial intelligence (AI) industry a potentially significant early victory in the development of the law regarding agentic commerce. A district court granted Amazon a preliminary injunction in March after finding “strong evidence” that Perplexity’s AI agent unlawfully accessed Amazon’s systems. The central legal issue was not whether Perplexity’s AI assistant interacted with Amazon’s website, but whether Perplexity itself “accessed” Amazon’s protected computers within the meaning of the statute. That distinction could prove highly consequential for developers of agentic AI systems. The judges acknowledged that agentic AI represents an emerging technology for which little precedent exists.