9th Cir effectively said that the customer was using their own Amazon account and their own Perplexity account to access Amazon, with AI acting as a tool, and that the AI was doing something Amazon ordinarily authorizes customers to do: browse, search, and shop. The court said it was was concerned that Amazon’s broader CFAA theory could end up making users criminally liable for using AI as a tool. Also, Amazon doesn't care about the user, it only cares about being able to prevent Perplexity from accessing their products.

It should be noted that suing gun manufacturers for murder has been done successfully. A more charitable comparison might be suing a torrent aggregator instead of the end users doing the distribution.