Personal AI agents that act on users’ behalf — including Meta’s Muse, Instinct and ChatGPT’s Dots — are increasingly running into barriers when interacting with commercial websites. Users report agents being unable to browse product catalogs, complete purchases or pass human-verification checks, creating confusion over whether blocks are intentional or a side effect of anti-bot defenses.
Where blocks are occurring and why
Amazon recently blocked Meta’s Muse from its retail site, preventing the agent from browsing or making purchases. Social media posts and user complaints have also pointed to problems on Walmart, airlines, eBay, Yelp, Zillow, Pizza Hut and Adidas, including account suspensions and sessions terminated mid-transaction.
Walmart said the disruptions it has seen were not intentional and noted it is a partner of Muse. The company attributed some failures to interrupted human-verification flows — for example, a click or confirmation that must succeed for an interaction to continue — which can cause agents to lose access when those checks fail.
Delta’s general manager of Global Communications, Heena Chavda, said Delta is taking steps to protect customers from unauthorized automated activity and would consider opening access to external AI agents only with “security and the customer experience in mind.” United pointed to its Terms of Use that prohibit robots or other automatic devices from accessing the site without prior written permission.
Industry and technical responses
Meta said it and several partners — including Walmart, Stripe, Sierra, Genesys, Rocket, NiCE and Decagon — are working on an open standard focused on agent-to-agent communication for online commerce. The aim, according to Meta, is to help distinguish user-authorized agents from malicious automation and give businesses clearer control.
Cloudflare has been cited as a factor after a change to crawler defaults on September 15 that shifted how site owners can block AI training and certain bot traffic; Cloudflare said it had no specific data to share and pointed to its public Cloudflare Radar for bot-activity trends. The company also operates a marketplace where bots may pay for data access and has been testing a browser for AI agents.
Yelp said non-human traffic is not permitted unless an agent has paid for access via its data licensing program. eBay said it does not ban all third-party shopping agents but restricts unauthorized agents and actions such as automated scraping and model training.
Meta maintains a list of “connectors” inside the Muse app to identify partners and says its partnership approach makes access issues reportable bugs rather than ambiguous blocks for customers.
Original source: TechCrunch AI