Banks, airlines and Amazon are blocking AI agents from their sites

The Verge reports that agents such as Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct's agent are hitting blocks on major websites. Delta is stopping agents from booking tickets for users, JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have confirmed they block agents from accessing accounts for security reasons, Yelp told TechCrunch it only allows agents that pay for its data licensing programme, and Amazon has said Muse's continued access breaks its site policies. Users also report that Cars.com and Amtrak stopped working, and general anti-bot systems such as Cloudflare's are catching agents too. Meta has instead struck deals with retailers including Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy, and Shopify has opened its storefronts to agents. On Hacker News (133 points, 125 comments), three commenters say the blocks are about money: sites earn from ads and from shoppers not comparing prices, and agents skip both. Three others side with blocking, saying agent and scraper traffic hammers sites, small businesses included. Five take the agents' side, saying an agent is the customer's proxy and sites that lock it out will lose sales or reverse course. Three suggest paying per request, such as HTTP 402 or Cloudflare's agent micropayments, as the fix. No consensus. Sorted take: Don't build a workflow that depends on an agent logging into a bank, airline or big marketplace; use official APIs or exports where they exist.