Agents can book, shop and clear out an inbox by now. The problem sits on the other side: more and more big websites won’t let them in. The Verge has collected where users ran into locked doors over the past few weeks, with Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots and Instinct.
Who is closing up, and why
Yelp told TechCrunch it only allows agents that pay for its data licensing program. Delta Air Lines blocks agents from booking tickets on a user’s behalf. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have both confirmed they keep agents away from accounts, citing security concerns.
Then there are the cases where nobody said anything. At Cars.com and Amtrak, users report that an agent worked before and doesn’t now. The Verge reads that as other companies quietly shutting the door.
The Amazon-Perplexity fight explains the pattern
The template is a year old. Amazon banned Perplexity’s shopping agent and sued the company. Its reasoning: it had “repeatedly requested” that Perplexity stop, and third parties buying on behalf of customers “should operate openly and respect service provider decisions whether or not to participate.”
Perplexity answered that Amazon doesn’t want agents on its platform because fewer human eyeballs end up in front of the ads. Self-serving as that is, it names a real retailer problem: an agent dropping an item in a cart doesn’t look at any advertising.
Schwab’s CEO calls the big shift incredibly unlikely
A day after the Verge piece, the Wall Street Journal spoke to Rick Wurster, chief executive of Charles Schwab. He thinks a massive, AI-powered shift of cash is “incredibly unlikely.” His evidence comes from a customer: an older woman told him ChatGPT was her best friend, messages it all day and bids it good night. For major money decisions she picks up the phone and calls her Schwab adviser.
The bottleneck isn’t the model anymore
For anyone running agents in a browser, the decisive question has moved. It is no longer whether the model can complete a booking, but whether the other side permits the transaction at all. And that answer follows the other side’s business model: outfits living on advertising lose reach to agents, outfits living on data sell access the way Yelp does, and outfits holding accounts see liability.
The practical upshot: an agent that works on a site today is no promise about tomorrow. Any workflow reaching into someone else’s website deserves a plan B — and it’s worth separating the cases where access is officially licensed from the cases where you simply haven’t been blocked yet.