AI agents can be a great tool to help make purchases for you online - but it can become a frustrating problem if the website you're using blocks their access.
Amazon is blocking rival shopping agents, and even websites that welcome AI assistants can stop them with an ordinary CAPTCHA. Meta's Muse has encountered this at Walmart, which says the verification checks weren't intended to stop the assistant. Amazon has been more direct, deliberately blocking the tool from shopping on its site.
Security is a bigger concern when money is involved. JPMorgan Chase CFO Jeremy Barnum said some agents use shared login credentials and screen scraping to transfer funds, methods he described as 'not secure.' The bank blocks those methods where possible.
Amazon is also battling Perplexity over its Comet AI browser. The retailer argues that the agent violates its access rules and puts customer data at risk, while Perplexity maintains that users have authorized it to act. Cloudflare now lets website owners distinguish between search crawlers, AI training bots and agents acting on behalf of users.
Source: Engadget · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing