As long as people have had more than one purchasing option, they’ve been comparing those options and looking for bargains. Online shoppers are no exception; in fact, one of the potential benefits of the internet is that it expands our options for everything from car rentals to airline tickets to dish soap. New AI tools can make the process even easier. These tools could provide some welcome relief for consumers facing sky-high prices that many cannot afford.

Unfortunately, Amazon is trying to block these helpful new tools, which can steer shoppers towards competitors. Taking a page from Facebook and RyanAir, they are trying to use computer crime laws to do it. 

Amazon’s target is Perplexity, which makes an AI-enabled web browser, called Comet, that allows users to browse the web as they normally would, but can also perform certain actions on the user’s behalf. For example, a user could ask Comet to find the best price on a 24-pack of toilet paper, and if satisfied with the results, have the browser order it. Amazon claims that Perplexity violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by building a tool that helps users access information on Amazon and engage with the site.

Unfortunately, a federal district court agreed. The court’s fundamental mistake: relying on the Ninth Circuit’s misguided decision in Facebook v Power Ventures, rather than the court’s much better and more applicable reasoning in hiQ Labs.

Perplexity has appealed to the Ninth Circuit. As we explain in an amicus brief filed in support, the district court’s mistake, if affirmed, could lead to myriad unintended consequences. Overbroad readings of the CFAA have undermined research, security, competition, and innovation. For years, we’ve worked to limit its scope to Congress’s original intention: actual hacking that bypasses computer security. It should have nothing to do with Amazon’s claims here, not least because most of Amazon’s website is publicly available.

The court’s approach would be especially dangerous for journalists and academic researchers. Researchers often create a variety of testing accounts. For example, if they’re researching how a service displays housing offers, they may create separate accounts associated with different race, gender, or language settings. These sorts of techniques may be adversarial to the company, but they shouldn’t be illegal. But according to the court’s opinion, if a company disagrees with this sort of research, it can’t just ban the researchers from using the site; it can render that research criminal by just sending a letter notifying the researcher that they’re not authorized to use the service in this way.

A broad reading of CFAA in this case would also undermine competition by enabling companies to limit data scraping, effectively cutting off one of the ways websites offer tools to compare prices and features.

The Ninth Circuit should follow Van Buren’s lead and interpret the CFAA narrowly, as Congress intended. Website owners do not need new shields against independent accountability.

While the very public fight continues between the Department of Defense and Anthropic over whether the government can punish a company for refusing to allow its technology to be used for mass surveillance, another agency of the U.S. government is quietly working to ensure that this dispute will never happen again. How? By rewriting government procurement rules.

Using procurement — meaning, the processes by which governments acquire goods and services — to accomplish policy goals is a time-honored and often appropriate strategy. The government literally expresses its politics and priorities by deciding where and how it spends its money. To that end, governments can and should give our tax dollars to companies and projects that serve the public interest, such as open-source software development, interoperability, or right to repair. And they should withhold those dollars from those that don’t, like shady contractors with inadequate security systems.

New proposed rules for the principal agency in charge of acquiring goods, property, and services for the federal government, the General Services Administration (GSA), are supposed to be primarily an effort to implement one policy priority: promoting “ideologically neutral” American AI innovation. But the new guidelines do far more than that.

As explained in comments filed today with our partners at the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Protect Democracy Project, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the GSA’s guidelines include broad provisions that would make AI tools less safe and less useful. If finally adopted, these provisions would become standard components of every federal contract. You can read the full comments here.

The most egregious example is a requirement that contractors and government service providers must license their AI systems to the government for “all lawful purposes.” Given the government’s loose interpretations of the law, ability to find loopholes to surveil you, and willingness to do illegal spying, we need serious and proactive legal restrictions to prevent it from gobbling up all the personal data it can acquire and using even routine bureaucratic data for punitive ends.

Relatedly, the draft rules require that “AI System(s) must not refuse to produce data outputs or conduct analyses based on the Contractor’s or Service Provider’s discretionary policies.” In other words, if a company’s safety guardrails might prevent responding to a government request, the company must disable those guardrails. Given widespread public concerns about AI safety, it seems misguided, at best, to limit the safeguards a company deems necessary.

There are myriad other problems with the draft rules, such as technologically incoherent “anti-Woke” requirements. But, the overarching problem is clear: much of this proposal would not serve the overall public interest in using American tax dollars to promote privacy, safety, and responsible technological innovation. The GSA should start over.