A Federal Judge Drew a Line Around Agentic Commerce. The Ninth Circuit Hasn't Said Whether It Holds.

Here's What It Means for Wholesale Distribution, and Why the Case Isn't Over.

On March 9, 2026, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a ruling that most of the wholesale distribution industry has not yet read, and the fight over whether that ruling survives is still being decided.

The case is Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI Inc. It is the first federal case to draw a legal boundary around agentic commerce at the preliminary injunction stage. Whether that boundary holds is now in the hands of the Ninth Circuit, and the outcome will shape how AI agents are allowed to transact in B2B wholesale distribution either way.

What Happened

Perplexity AI built a product called Comet, an AI browser that shops on behalf of users. A customer gives Comet their Amazon credentials and the agent browses and purchases for them. From the user's perspective, it is a convenience tool. From Amazon's perspective, it is an unauthorized intrusion.

Amazon argued that Perplexity deliberately disguised Comet's AI agent as a regular Google Chrome browser session, evading detection rather than transparently identifying itself. Amazon said it warned Perplexity at least five times, implemented a technical barrier in August 2025, and watched Perplexity release a software update within 24 hours to circumvent it.

Amazon sued in November 2025. On March 9, 2026, Judge Maxine Chesney granted Amazon a preliminary injunction blocking Perplexity from using Comet to access password-protected sections of Amazon, including Prime subscriber accounts, and required Perplexity to destroy any Amazon data it had collected.

Perplexity appealed immediately, and here is where the story most people in the industry haven't caught up on: the Ninth Circuit put the injunction on hold less than three weeks later, on March 30, pending the outcome of that appeal. Perplexity filed its full appellate brief on May 8. The two sides argued the case in front of a three-judge panel in Seattle on June 11, 2026. As of this writing, the panel has not ruled. The injunction is not currently in effect, and whether it ever takes effect again depends on a decision that hasn't been made yet.

The Legal Distinction That Changes Everything, If It Survives Appeal

The district court's ruling turned on two words: permission versus authorization.

Judge Chesney treated user consent and platform authorization as two separate legal requirements. In her reasoning, a shopper giving Comet their Amazon login credentials did not automatically give Comet the right to use them on Amazon's platform, once Amazon had sent a cease-and-desist letter revoking that authorization.

If that reasoning stands, it effectively establishes a hierarchy: platform rules can override user instructions when it comes to automated access. For platform operators like Amazon, that would provide an early playbook: explicit terms of service restricting AI agent behavior, requirements for agent identification, and formal revocation of access strengthening legal claims against unauthorized automated activity. Perplexity's appeal argues the opposite: that the user is the authorized party throughout, that Comet acts under the user's delegated authority, and that a company's terms of service cannot manufacture a federal computer-crime violation out of software acting on a user's own instructions. Digital rights groups including the EFF and Mozilla filed briefs backing that view. The fact that the Ninth Circuit granted a stay at all is being read by several legal observers as a signal the panel may take that argument seriously.

The legal foundation on both sides is the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The underlying question hasn't been settled: does a user consenting to let an AI act on their behalf resolve the authorization question, or does the platform where that action takes place get an independent veto? Right now, nobody knows which way the Ninth Circuit will land.

What This Means for Wholesale Distribution, Regardless of How the Appeal Comes Out

The Amazon/Perplexity dispute was decided, provisionally, on consumer e-commerce. If the reasoning holds on appeal, it applies with equal force to B2B wholesale distribution, and the stakes there are considerably higher.

Wholesale distributors hold something Amazon does not. The pricing a distributor extends to a contractor is not a list price pulled from a catalog. It is the product of years, sometimes decades, of earned relationship. Volume commitments honored. Credit extended and repaid. A sales rep who knew the contractor's foreman by name before the contractor ever had an ERP system. These negotiated terms, credit history, contract pricing tiers, and account-specific availability data live inside proprietary distributor ERP and CRM systems. They are not public. They are not generic. They belong to a relationship that was built one transaction, one phone call, and one jobsite delivery at a time.

This is the tripartite relationship at the heart of B2B wholesale distribution: the contractor, the distributor, and the manufacturer whose product moves through that channel. Each party has earned their position in that chain. The distributor earned the contractor's trust through service, reliability, and terms no online marketplace can replicate. The manufacturer earned the distributor's loyalty through training, co-op programs, and preferred allocation agreements. The contractor earned the distributor's preferential pricing through consistent volume and a track record of doing business the right way.

Here is why this matters even while the appeal is pending: whichever way the Ninth Circuit rules, the direction platforms are moving in is already visible. Amazon sued. A district judge sided with Amazon on the merits at the preliminary stage. That alone tells you platforms with something to protect are willing to use every legal tool available to control who accesses their systems and how. Data sovereignty is no longer an abstract IT concern for wholesale distributors. It is a boardroom issue. Distributors, major solar OEMs, and wholesale manufacturers are increasingly aware that rogue LLMs and unauthorized agents could scrape their most sensitive commercial data: the Special Pricing Agreements (SPAs) that define account-specific pricing negotiated over years of earned volume. If a competitor's agent captures your SPA structure, your pricing advantage evaporates, no court ruling required.

IVAN was built to protect that data perimeter regardless of how the CFAA question eventually gets resolved. It ensures that SPA data, contract terms, and account-specific pricing are surfaced only to credentialed agents representing authorized accounts, never exposed to the open network, and never visible to competitors. The transaction closes. The data stays sovereign.

IVAN was architected from the ground up to protect these relationships rather than exploit them. The distributor is sovereign inside IVAN. A contractor's AI procurement agent does not arrive uninvited. The distributor decides which agents are credentialed, what data those agents can see, and under what conditions a transaction can be executed on their behalf. A credentialed agent inherits only the permissions the contractor's account already carries, nothing more. It sees the pricing that contractor has earned. It cannot see another contractor's terms. It cannot see a competitor distributor's data. It transacts only within the boundaries the distributor has defined.

This is what permissionable agent access means in practice. The distributor publishes the rules. IVAN enforces them. The agent operates within them. The relationship that took thirty years to build is not disrupted. It is made machine-readable so that it survives the agentic era intact. That architecture doesn't depend on which side wins in the Ninth Circuit. If courts ultimately side with Amazon's reasoning, IVAN's credentialing model is exactly the kind of authorized-access framework that reasoning rewards. If courts side with Perplexity instead, and user consent alone is enough to authorize an agent, IVAN still gives distributors the only real control they have: deciding what a credentialed agent can see once it's in the door.

The Bottom Line for Distributors

B2B agentic commerce is not coming. It is here. Retailers and distributors are racing to adapt to a world in which buyers use AI to compare products and make purchases, while merchants try to protect customer relationships, data, and revenue. The distributors who define the terms of AI agent access now will be positioned to own that relationship no matter how the legal questions eventually settle. Those who wait will find those terms defined for them, by courts, by platforms, or by whichever competitor moved first.

The Amazon/Perplexity case is still being decided. What it has already made clear is that a company the size of Amazon is willing to go to federal court over who gets to access its systems and how. Betting that no one will ever ask the same question about your SPA data is not a strategy.

ProEnergy Supply built IVAN to be the authorized, neutral, distributor-sovereign intelligence proxy through which AI procurement agents earn access to a distributor's closed-loop network, not as an intruder, but as a credentialed partner operating inside a framework the distributor controls. We built that answer before the Ninth Circuit had a chance to ask the question.

ProEnergy Supply LLC is the developer of IVAN, an AI procurement agent, and the patent-pending Neutral Intelligence Proxy Network Architecture for B2B Agentic Commerce. Learn more at proenergysupply.com