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.