ICLE Research Cited in Let’s Data Science on CFAA and Agentic AI
Let’s Data Science cited ICLE research in a piece examining how courts may apply the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to AI agents that browse the web and execute transactions autonomously on users’ behalf.
The article drew on ICLE’s analysis of the CFAA’s statutory language and enforcement history in the context of the Ninth Circuit case Amazon v. Perplexity AI. The underlying research was conducted by President and Founder Geoffrey Manne and Director of Innovation Policy Kristian Stout.
Read the full piece here. Read the ICLE paper here.
The dispute centers on how courts apply legacy access statutes to software that acts autonomously on a user’s behalf. Per Jones Day and IAPP, Ninth Circuit precedent such as Power Ventures v. Facebook (844 F.3d 1058) and related Supreme Court decisions frame the legal questions about authorization and revocation of access. Commentators at the International Center for Law & Economics argue that the CFAA’s statutory language and enforcement history make it a blunt instrument for resolving disputes over agentic browsing and automated transactions. For practitioners building agentic integrations, these doctrinal issues translate into legal uncertainty about credentialed automation, detection-evasion behavior, and liability allocation among platform, agent provider, and end user.