{"id":212748,"date":"2026-02-12T14:27:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T19:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T14:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T19:45:09","slug":"ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/12\/ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Agents Are Raising New Questions of Fraud and Privacy Liability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pymnts.com\/cpi-posts\/ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability\/\">AI Agents Are Raising New Questions of Fraud and Privacy Liability<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pymnts.com\/cpi-posts\/ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability\/\">https:\/\/www.pymnts.com\/cpi-posts\/ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-02-12 14:27:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.pymnts.com\">www.pymnts.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Courts are beginning to answer a critical question for the digital economy: when autonomous AI agents act on a user\u2019s behalf, who bears legal responsibility under statutes written decades before such systems existed?<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">A recent analysis of litigation trends <span class=\"s1\">by Babalakin &#038; Co.<\/span> highlights how judges are applying two established technology statutes \u2014 the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) \u2014 to disputes involving so-called agentic AI systems. For businesses building or deploying these tools, the early case law offers concrete compliance signals.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The CFAA, enacted in 1986 as an anti-hacking statute, imposes liability for accessing a protected computer \u201cwithout authorization\u201d or in a manner that \u201cexceeds authorized access.\u201d Its scope has been narrowed by recent precedent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">In\u00a0Van Buren v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court held that \u201cexceeds authorized access\u201d applies only when a user accesses off-limits areas of a computer, not when they misuse data they are otherwise entitled to obtain. And in\u00a0hiQ Labs Inc. v. LinkedIn Corp., the Ninth Circuit concluded that scraping publicly available data from a site without authentication barriers does not violate the \u201cwithout authorization\u201d prong.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">By contrast, in\u00a0Facebook Inc. v. Power Ventures Inc., the Ninth Circuit found liability where the defendant circumvented IP blocking measures after receiving a cease-and-desist letter.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">These precedents frame the dispute in\u00a0Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI Inc., currently pending in the Northern District of California. Amazon alleges that Perplexity\u2019s AI agent, Comet, accessed nonpublic pages of Amazon\u2019s platform using customer credentials while bypassing technical barriers and bot-detection measures. Perplexity argues the agent acted at the direction of authorized account holders.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">The case crystallizes a central issue for agentic AI: does user authorization suffice, or can platforms&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.pymnts.com\/cpi-posts\/ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI Agents Are Raising New Questions of Fraud and Privacy Liability https:\/\/www.pymnts.com\/cpi-posts\/ai-agents-are-raising-new-questions-of-fraud-and-privacy-liability\/ Publish Date: 2026-02-12&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":212749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.pymnts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/AI-micro-agents.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-212748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212748"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212748"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":212750,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212748\/revisions\/212750"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}