Even in cases decided thirty years apart, there remains a necessary volitional nexus between human conduct and machine action for there to be liability.

The Ninth Circuit recently confronted a distinctly modern question in Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444 (9th Cir. Aug. 4, 2026). Amazon objected to the use of Perplexity’s AI-powered browser to interact with Amazon’s website on behalf of users. In addressing Amazon’s claims under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. § 1030) and a similar California statute, the court treated the human user as the person accessing Amazon, with the AI agent functioning as a tool through which that access occurred. The decision is narrow, but the action-attribution question behind it is not.

Perplexity’s technology does more than simply display webpages. Its agent can interpret what appears on a page, determine what steps are necessary to accomplish a user’s request, and then take a sequence of actions on the user’s behalf. The user supplies the objective and sends the agent off to accomplish it, while the software determines much of what happens in between. That makes the relationship between human conduct and machine action more complicated than it is with a conventional browser.

But it may also make one part of the attribution analysis relatively clear. There is a meaningful connection between the user’s volitional act of directing the agent and the resulting activity on Amazon’s computers. By “volitional nexus,” I mean the connection between a person’s purposeful conduct and the particular act carried out by the machine that gives rise to legal consequences. The agent may choose the means, but it is pursuing an objective that the user supplied.

That way of looking at the problem has an older analogue. In Religious Technology Center v. Netcom On-Line Communication Services, Inc., 907 F. Supp. 1361 (N.D. Cal. 1995), a user posted allegedly infringing material to a Usenet newsgroup. The operation of the network caused copies of the material to be made automatically on computer systems operated by intermediaries, including Netcom. The copyright owners argued that those automatic copies made the intermediary operators direct infringers.

Following the volition

Netcom became important for its focus on volitional conduct. Netcom operated the equipment that made the copies, but there was no sufficiently meaningful connection between Netcom’s own volitional conduct and the particular copying that gave rise to the claim of direct infringement. Its computers were responding automatically to conduct initiated by the user. The court therefore looked beyond the immediate operation of the machine and asked whose conduct had actually set the infringing event in motion.

That helps bring Perplexity into greater relief. In Netcom, the connection between the intermediary’s volitional conduct and the liability-producing copies was weak, while the connection to the user who posted the material was much stronger. In Perplexity, the connection between the user’s volitional conduct and the resulting computer access is more direct still because the user expressly dispatches the agent to accomplish a particular objective. The technology separating the human instruction from the resulting act is far more sophisticated, but the underlying attributional instinct looks remarkably similar.

The same problem became harder as internet services assumed a larger role in producing automated results. In Viacom International, Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., 676 F.3d 19 (2d Cir. 2012), the parties disputed whether YouTube’s automated processing and display of user-uploaded videos involved sufficient volitional conduct to support direct infringement. The Second Circuit ultimately focused on the DMCA safe harbor and did not resolve the direct-infringement dispute on volition grounds. Still, questions about volitional conduct and automated processing became harder as online platforms did more than merely transmit what users supplied.

The Supreme Court’s decision in American Broadcasting Companies, Inc. v. Aereo, Inc., 573 U.S. 431 (2014), complicated the picture further. Aereo’s system operated automatically after a subscriber selected a television program, yet the Court treated Aereo itself as performing the copyrighted works. The decision showed that automation alone does not determine where legally significant conduct will be located. Increasingly elaborate technological systems can make the connection between human volition and machine action harder to trace.

Whose act is it?

Agentic AI makes that tracing exercise more important. An AI agent can examine changing circumstances, select among different courses of action, and undertake intermediate steps that the user never specifically directed. At the same time, its activity may remain tightly connected to the objective supplied by the person who sent it out to act. The relevant question may therefore be less whether the machine acted and more how closely the machine-produced event can be connected to the volitional conduct of the person whose legal responsibility is at issue.

Different bodies of law can locate that connection differently. Copyright asks whose volitional conduct produced a copy or performance, while computer access law asks who accessed a protected computer and whether that access was authorized. Tort law can frame the attribution problem another way. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149, a Canadian tribunal attributed inaccurate statements made by a website chatbot to Air Canada, which had deployed the chatbot as a means of communicating with its customers, and held the airline liable for negligent misrepresentation.

Agency law may also provide a useful way of thinking about these relationships as AI agents become more capable. Agency doctrine has long addressed circumstances in which one actor carries out the purposes of another, although those rules developed around human actors. AI makes the relationship stranger because the system can have considerable freedom in choosing the means while still pursuing a purpose supplied by someone else. Courts may increasingly have to ask how much intervening machine discretion is enough to weaken the volitional nexus between the originating human act and what the system ultimately does.

Netcom does not supply the doctrinal answer to Perplexity, and neither case provides a general rule for AI agents. What Netcom does provide is a useful way to see the newer case more clearly. Internet law has long looked beyond the fact that a machine performed the immediate act and asked whose volitional conduct is sufficiently connected to the event that matters legally. AI agents make the machinery between human purpose and machine action much more capable, but they do not make that inquiry obsolete. They may make the volitional nexus more important than ever.