The Ninth Circuit just decided who an agent is

When software acts for you, who is the actor? A court has answered — you are — and the entire agent economy was waiting on it without quite saying so.

An appeals court overturned an order barring Perplexity's Comet shopping agent from Amazon, holding that under the federal computer-hacking statute it was users, not Perplexity, who accessed the site. The agent is an instrument. The person holding it is the actor.

What was actually at stake

Had it gone the other way, any site could have blocked agents by asserting unauthorised access under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — a statute with criminal teeth. Every piece of software that shops, books or compares on a user's behalf would have needed permission from every destination it touched. Consumer agents would have become a permissioned market, and permissioned markets have incumbents rather than entrants.

The doctrine is tidy; the fit is not

Treating a tool as an extension of its user is ancient and sensible. It also imports an assumption: that the person understands and directs the tool. That assumption fits a hammer better than a system which plans its own route to a goal. Ask an agent to find the best price and you have authorised no particular sequence of requests.

Where the pressure goes next

Obligations do not disappear when doctrine settles, they relocate. Sites keep contract and technical remedies — terms, rate limits, authentication. Vendors remain answerable for what they ship. But the default has flipped from prohibited-unless-permitted to permitted-unless-restricted, and defaults decide which markets get to exist at all.

The harder question — how responsibility divides between a person, a vendor, and a system that improvises — is now open on the record. This is the first case that forces it, and it will not be the last.

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