Ninth Circuit Rules AI Agents Act on Behalf of Users, Not Developers

When an autonomous AI agent accesses a password-protected website, who actually does the accessing? According to the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the person who directed the agent to access the site is the one responsible, not the company that developed the agent and certainly not the agent itself. In a case involving Perplexity and Amazon.com, a three-judge panel of the appeals court vacated a lower court’s grant of a preliminary injunction barring Perplexity from accessing password-