I don’t think it’s hard to understand why an airline would get tired of getting more refund requests and customer service escalations for refusal of same according to agreed upon terms by entitled jerks who don’t want to accept the consequences of the decisions their ShitClaw made on their behalf.

Sure, the airline may not notice when it happens but it can cut those processes short when they have a full ban.

You can better understand the context here if you go read between the lines of the Amazon vs Perplexity case, and take a look at the appeal - who else was supporting Amazon? You will notice a trade group called Airlines for America.

Why is this? If you go look at the financial statements of airlines (for which Airlines for America is the industry trade group), you will understand that a large portion of their profits come from monetizing human friction and attention.

Imagine things like upsells for their branded credit cards, feeding into the points game, etc. These are all things that appeal to humans, but that agents are almost certainly going to skip and then relentlessly price-compare the flight at the end of the funnel.

Now, once Amazon’s appeal was denied by the court, it became obvious that they needed to resort to technical solutions if they could not block it by trying to leverage the CFAA. Therefore, these industries are now implementing technical solutions.

Ultimately, personal agents are a huge consumer benefit, but they challenge the business models underlying much of the internet. I expect to see more of this kind of behavior from incumbents, which ironically leaves them vulnerable to disruption by players who do support agents, as this market shift plays out.

It is possible to detect Claude controlling your Chrome browser, as well as many computer use agents. Give this a try: https://demo.switchfrog.com. Ultimately though the mainstream agents will (and mostly already do) self-identify and businesses will adapt.

Source: I am the founder of a company in the space, Switchfrog.

So this is why United airlines and all the other folks should open up an API or MCP server for agents. When you do that, you make it easy for the agent to do the right thing, and go through a known access point which you can control and rate limit.

The user also has more fine grained permission over the interaction. They could choose to give permissions just to read account details or flight info or to actually make a purchase. United knows it's an agent acting.

Of course, unbehaved agents will still go around, but by providing a golden path, the better behaved ones will be better citizens.

The alternative is, as parent comment suggests, a user can allow Claude to drive their browser. Then, apart from heuristics, United Airlines can't really tell the difference between Claude driving the browser and a user driving the browser. Therefore you have less granular permissions and more unbounded actions and risk. There is no way to audit what is done by a human being versus by an agent. And United Airlines still has agents interacting with their site.

For the big corporations (consumer facing), they are not necessarily able to adopt change because:

1) they are under tremendous amount compliance boundaries, liabilities ambiguities and customer support issues, when agents go rogue or caused monetary damages to both service providers or merchants and consumers.

2) we collectively haven't figured out a way how agenic commerce would work. They have been some ideas floating around from Google, Shopify Cloudflare, but it nowhere near settled as a consensus.

3) Fraud/spam/cyber - Agents AMPLIFY these malicious interactions with their existing Human User Interface (HCI). In other words, the current HCI is not designed for agentic interactions.

For example: If your Meta Muse agent buys a $5k business class ticket from US to Europe using your Chase credit card that you find out after the fact, and you call your credit card companies for non-authorized transaction chargeback, who's responsible to the damages? Did you authorize the agent to buy tickets not?

If Chase denies your chargeback and make you liable for $5k to be paid, you pay for it or no? If you don't pay for it, United sues you in court, do you tell the judge you didn't authorize your agent to buy that ticket? Or you sue Meta instead? You see where this is going??

> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

They need to make a best-effort demonstration that they are complying with the federal regulations.

The federal regulations require that flyers see notices about banned luggage and other requirements. The article covers this.

The thing is, they don't need to go to extremes to detect and ban everything. They can state their policy and then they have some coverage if regulators come knocking.

I would guess they're also dealing with the same problems that occur in other spaces involving reservations: AI agents tend to operate greedily and optimistically by default. A common situation in other industries is that they'll read a cancellation policy, then proactively make a reservation before asking the user if they want it. The agent will try to hold a spot and then schedule a cancellation before the window ends (example, 23 hours into a 24 hour cancellation period) and wait for the user to confirm.

As a result, the churn rate for agent-created reservations is very different than when humans do it, which breaks a lot of assumptions and financial expectations.

Unregulated spaces like restaurants can charge a non-refundable reservation fee or threaten cancellation fees (which is enough to scare off agents, for now at least) but regulated spaces like airlines may be required to process cancellations according to some rules. So now if you have agents everywhere exhibiting reservation/cancellation behavior that nobody expected and it's changing suddenly with each new update of Meta Muse or other system, it gets messy.

AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions. When an agent running 24/7 with a goal of maximizing its owners' happiness starts doing things, some of these systems break down.

So I can see multiple reasons why they'd want to officially disallow it. I would expect that making it a formal rule is enough to start getting Claude, Meta Muse, and others to add a guardrail forbidding it too.

Not going to stop the motivated individual running OpenRouter tokens and some complex local agent setup, but that's such a small number of people it can be ignored.

The misunderstanding is that they're not selling flights, they're mainly selling insurances and credit cards. The valuation of some airlines' loyalty programs is higher than their company valuation. That is: operating flights comes at a loss. Flights are just the bait, and then the process is designed to extract maximum value from the caught human through phsychological tricks. Agents are not so suspectible to those tricks, so the airline doesn't make enough money.

Must see by Wendover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4

It’s pretty easy to stop Claude or ChatGPT since they won’t fill CAPTCHAS or get around any step designed to stop them. They play nice. 99% of the population couldn’t figure out how to run any model that doesn’t.

So while it’s not an impenetrable barrier, it will almost completely solve the problem they’re trying to.

They might not be able to stop you, but they can cancel your flight if they determine later that you violated the ToS or contract of carriage.

If you look at how airlines make money, you'll see that an agent skipping over the airline website's internal ads for the loyalty program, credit card partners, pushy upsells of seating/refundability, etc...destroys their revenue model. Not endorsing this approach of just banning agents, but it's easy to see why they don't know what to do yet.

I don't think they're actually trying to stop you. Rather it's a public stance to protect them from customers' misaligned agents. They don't want to be liable for actions your agent took on your behalf; e.g. refunding a ticket when your agent bought the wrong one.

The "ban" doesn't have to be an actual technical ban, but a "ban" in the sense that you automatically forfeit your rights to customer service or a refund if a human doesn't do the booking.

>How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

Just like other companies that have similar low alternative services. They let you do it. They log and flag and as soon as you have a problem, instead of working to solve it, they see you are on the flagged list and you are now banned from the service. People who find themselves banned from an airline when they miss a connection or report lost luggage have done some other activity that got them to be flagged as a potential unwanted customer.

I made a Chrome plugin for VRBO sites that parsed pet policy on vacation homes as the info was all over the listing and not consistent for visual parsing. In spite of aggressive backoff, a weekend's worth of usage by me and vrbo put the kibosh on my IP.

The problem is that AI agents play all sorts of games to get better prices, and this guzzles resources that are supposed to be for dealing with legitimate problems. e.g. If an airline is dealing with an AI caller that's rescheduling a flight it intentionally booked at the wrong time to shave a few bucks off an airfare, somebody who needs to cancel a flight to attend a funeral will wait longer in line. If a human does this to save a few bucks, you let them. It's not a big problem because most people place more value on their own time. If everybody uses AI agents to do this for them, then you have to do something.

Airlines and other companies are faced with a choice: Let everything go to shit for people who don't use AI agents, or start discouraging the use of AI agents. It will be interesting to see whether companies embrace anti-AI AI agents or try to weight the penalties such that deterrence is achieved without them. e.g. Would you continue using an AI agent to book flights if you faced a potential lifetime ban from that airline?

I personally like the idea of AI surcharges. The airline could put it in their ToS that any use of AI booking agents will result in a surcharge. If your account gets flagged for AI agent games, you get an AI surcharge slapped on your flight. In the case of a false positive, if a human calls up and demands the surcharge be dropped, you do it. If an AI agent calls to complain, you double it. Most users of AI agents don't want to deal with customer service to get surcharges dropped every time they book a flight. This would make it cheaper and/or easier to just book a flight yourself... or use a very well behaved AI agent.

Why would they need to stop you? Why can't you voluntarily respect their wishes? What's with this entitlement that AI users have that they have a right to unleash their automation on services that have made it clear that they do not want that.

Ideally the wish to not have your service accessed by automation should also be legally enforceable. And we need clear precident that users and operators of automation are 100% liable for the damages they cause.

They won't with perfect accuracy, and I'm sure you're right that some methods will be a lot more difficult to detect reliably (e.g., a Muse agent that runs in a specific type of VM and is hosted in known data centers using specific network providers vs an LLM moving your laptop's cursor to navigate the website).

But pretty much every company that's involved with payment risk assessments, identity verification, or bot detection (Forter, Incode, Akamai, etc.) now has services they're trying to sell to merchants so that they can identify agentic traffic. Time will tell how effective they are with the different varieties of automation.

Some merchants want that capability to make sure legitimately authorized AI agents don't get unduly tangled in fraud prevention systems, but others, like United it seems, will use it to try to block them outright.

> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible

It is still but you're not shopping around prices based off "you have a product, I have money". You're shopping around because "you have a product that others also sell and I will pay any one of you the least amount of money I can get away with".

> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

I proactively answered this very question in my own comment. Initially they will try and block your chrome plugin and if they fail, then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website. More context in my own comment but this is a very reasonable question to ask.

I don't know but given the fact we now live in a post-truth era and heavy AI agent/assistants users now embrace heavily hallucinations and have stopped checking output quality and sources anymore like they used to in 2024 and early 2025, I would do the opposite. Detect AI use as much as possible and charge them more automatically as the customer behind becomes the easiest to trick.

I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible - right, and then your child spends 100k in amazon orders and we blame the merchants for not having better checks. Or the state fines the merchant for not ensuring that a person did indeed check in or attest to something personally. How do you prove the LLM collected your TOS agreement? I used to want this too, but having engineered multiple systems in regulated industries, automation will never be as simple as we want it to be.

> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

They don't have to. The policy itself allows them to take consequential actions to address various issues in this regard.

Because the product is often not what we think it is anymore.

Surely the airline company makes money with the actual flight... but also they might start to make money with selling private data. Maybe they even start to make MORE money due to a commission on car rental, hotel, tourist attraction, etc than the actual flight.

The "product", due to pressure from competition, enshittification, novel alternatives, is changing and we as customers don't necessarily notice it. In fact the company is probably doing its very best so that we don't and can thus benefit with side effects that we are not aware of, otherwise we would ask for compensation.

So... I'm not justifying the practice but also business wise, it makes sense that they try to keep control of everything around their product.

With Captchas? But I do understand your sentiment

> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

The endgame is just to raise prices for everyone. It's not like airlines are making a ton of money. Everything affects their profits and small margins.

The relationship is unfortunately different nowadays. «You have money, we are going to manipulate you». When the profit demands on them being able to manipulate you, an AI is bad news.

> Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin

Chrome has this architectural problem where the webpage can see what extensions you have installed. United could just refuse to run if you have that installed.

> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude

The righteous Claude would refuse to book on that airline. It already refuses to search amazon.com.

But I agree that at that point I'll just change the agent, or use local model that is less principled.

This is relevant: https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2026/08/04/2...

You don't seem to understand, it's fine for them to use AI to use "dynamic pricing" but for you to navigate their ridiculous refund/claim processes, using AI, that's "unfair"

You see how it's unfair when you do it... right?

> you have a product, I have money

> I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking

Looks like saga about exporting GPU to China :)

I have booked several flights using cdp browsing with my local agent. The more friction they add for agents, the more there will be for humans and the market will vote with their feet (or agents).

They're going to put it in their terms of carriage that if you use an AI agent to book a flight they get to dump you in the middle of the Pacific. Hope you're a good swimmer.

"like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants" which ones?

From a technical perspective, does anyone know if Claude in Chrome is detectable beyond artificial movement?

I have been exploring know your agent solutions and nobody can give me an honest answer.

Yes, but how much do you value that money, and how much do you value our product?

:^)

Would you have a problem if instead of stopping you, they charged you more because you're booking with an agent?

"if you were me, then I'd be you, and use your body to get to the top." - ace venture

Because Claude can be legally compelled to advertise its "claude" acting on behalf of a human? Such a policy isn't that crazy.

Now sure you could bypass this by running your own harness/tooling, but then you'd be in breach of laws. There's various policies like this today around web scraping

> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible.

It is - these restrictions are part of the product. How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it. How much more would you pay in order to have a LLM purchase a ticket for you?

> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

Maybe they won't be able to stop you, but the average Joe won't be able to cover his tracks as effectively, or most likely, Claude Code and others will by default be required to assert the browser for the current session is being operated by an agent.

You always had an adversarial relationship. You just didn't see it until you tried to push back on the information asymmetry they wield.

If they notice you doing it, you won't be allowed to board the flight, and won't get a refund. This is the usual way things like this are enforced.

They can ban you by name and birthdate combo, united mileage number, and/or your debit/credit card pan if detected. They have no obligation to allow you to purchase air travel online, it is their right to refuse you service.

(know folks inside United, but not speaking in any way for the company, I just know how the process works, as a curious security person)

>(Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)

By that time, the open obliterated models will have caught up and will be able to do this just as well as the current frontier models, if not better.

They can ban you.

> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?

They don’t.

When a dispute that either party(you or United airlines in this theoretical case) decides to litigate an argument far enough that it becomes clear you used an AI agent like Claude then you are going to run afoul of the CFAA[1] and are going to get fucked legally because they stated who could access their site and you violated it with your agents against their stated will.

This is a legal ward, not a technical one. Violate it at your own peril.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

they don't care if you do that, because as far as they're concerned it's you that booked that ticket. you can't turn around and demand a refund or sue them because it "wasn't you, it was your agent".

they just don't want the possible liability of dealing with whatever legalities that might occur from autonomous agent usage. and i can't really blame em for that.

I've been saying this same thing. It used to feel like businesses actually appreciated your custom to some extent. Not all of them, not every time, but in general it seemed like they wanted to give you something in exchange for your money and saw you as a partner in their success.

Now it feels like a lot of businesses don't see the customer as any sort of partner. They're an obstacle that stands between the business and the customer's bank account, to be removed by any means possible. Providing goods or services in exchange for part of that bank account is merely an unfortunate and undesirable necessity that they haven't yet figured out how to avoid.