alt Hacker NewsThey 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.
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They just use a residential proxy and direct their traffic through a user cellphone with Facebook or Instagram installed, or from an LG television.
Wait until they discover agents are a sign of having a larger disposable income.
Then it will be like the higher percent you pay for the Titanium Plus Card holders, and complaints will vanish.
It's pretty easy to circumvent all those checks if you're doing normal-ish things (like doing a single series of searches to prepare to purchase a single flight) and their detection doesn't ban a large fraction of non-bot customers. Those companies might sell bot detection, but it only works against the poorly coded bots and legitimately abusive accounts (sometimes) if you don't turn the false positive dial way up.