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NewsTopic · AI智能体网络访问之争3 min read·2026-10-20

AI Agents Are Neither Human Nor Bot: MIT Technology Review Warns Redesigning the Web for Them Could Harm Ordinary Users

Journalist James O'Donnell argues in MIT Technology Review that personal AI agents like OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse represent a third category of web visitor—neither human nor traditional bot, but entities acting on behalf of individuals at machine speed to perform legitimate tasks. Existing website classification systems cannot accommodate this new category, producing a landscape where blocking (Amazon's litigation against Perplexity) and accommodation (Shopify's dedicated agent checkout lanes) coexist. The article predicts that if demand for agents continues to grow, the internet will be increasingly redesigned for them rather than for humans, leaving ordinary users with worse interfaces, frequent verification demands, agent-targeted differential pricing, and opaque recommendation mechanisms.

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2026-10-20 02:22 GMT+8

The internet has long had only two categories of visitors: humans and bots. Websites allow bots to crawl page content but govern their access scope and behavior through rules; human users occasionally solve captchas to prove they are not bots. This binary classification system is being upended by personal AI agents.

MIT Technology Review journalist James O'Donnell, writing on October 19, 2026, argues that personal AI agents unleashed at scale by apps like OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse constitute a third category of web visitor: they are not human, operating at machine speed, but they are not quite traditional bots either, because they act on behalf of specific individuals to perform legitimate and useful tasks such as booking flights or negotiating prices. Muse was downloaded five million times in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled from August to September 2026.

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The conflict between this new category and existing systems has already materialized. TechCrunch reported users finding websites from Pizza Hut to Yelp refusing agent access, with Yelp explicitly disallowing AI restaurant reservations. Amazon blocked Muse's agents and is waging a court battle against AI startup Perplexity to block its agents as well; although a US court judge recently ruled in favor of Perplexity, Amazon has filed an appeal arguing that AI agents threaten its advertising business by making it harder to distinguish between ads seen by humans and those served to bots.

Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, predicts that such blocking will soon affect the entire web. He argues that once it becomes common knowledge that AI agents can be sent to request refunds or negotiate prices, agents will overwhelm customer service departments to the point where they become unusable by real people. 'Humans will eventually get very annoyed when their agents aren't allowed to do this on their behalf,' he recently wrote on LinkedIn.

Yet economic incentives are pushing in the opposite direction. O'Donnell notes that the vast majority of agentic web traffic goes to e-commerce sites, meaning platforms have money to be made if they allow legions of new AI agents to shop on behalf of real people. E-commerce giant Shopify is already welcoming agents by giving them their own checkout lanes that bypass pages designed for humans.

The article's core concern is what happens to the experience left for ordinary people as platforms redesign the internet for agents that will eventually outnumber us. O'Donnell sketches several specific possibilities: websites become increasingly neglected as destinations for real people, users who want to browse and compare products themselves encounter worse interfaces; verification systems are imperfect, and humans may constantly be asked to prove they are not agents (perhaps even needing iris scans); the same product displays different prices to different people's agents; users can never tell whether an agent's recommendation is influenced by advertisements or platform commissions.

This stands in tension with the future promised by Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI—in which AI agents give consumers greater power and bargaining leverage. O'Donnell acknowledges that promise is not outlandish; agents are genuinely capable of helping people fight bogus medical bills or research more affordable car insurance. But whether they can actually be used for these purposes depends on what rules are set for how agents interact with websites and what exactly they are allowed to do. These rules are still being written. Some will benefit everyone—neither consumers nor businesses want credit card information waved around by agents wherever they roam the web, for example, and rules keeping agents more secure are a good thing. It is the more contested questions—whether businesses can block agents from their websites or prevent them from negotiating better deals for consumers—that will determine whether the web ultimately becomes a highway for agents working for us or against us.

Sources

  • 原始出处technologyreview.com↗
Topic

AI智能体网络访问之争

OpenAI的Dots和Meta的Muse等个人AI智能体正成为互联网的第三类访客：它们既非人类也非传统机器人，而是以机器速度代表用户执行合法任务。这一新类别打破了网站原有的二元分类系统，引发了平台封禁与接纳并存的混乱局面。

4 steps1 piecesUpdated 2026-10-20 12:50

How it got here

  1. 2025-11-01亚马逊向Perplexity发送停止侵权函，要求阻止其Comet浏览器中的AI购物工具访问亚马逊网站。
  2. 2026-03-09美国加州北区地方法院批准亚马逊的初步禁令申请，认定Perplexity未经授权使用智能体访问亚马逊账户违反CFAA。
  3. 2026-08-04美国联邦第九巡回上诉法院撤销初步禁令，裁定在用户指挥下，是用户而非Perplexity“访问”了亚马逊计算机，亚马逊难以证明CFAA违规。

What is still unsettled

  • 亚马逊上诉后，最高法院是否会受理此案并确立更广泛的智能体法律责任标准？
  • 除了CFAA，平台能否通过服务条款（ToS）违约成功起诉未经授权但代表用户操作的AI智能体？
  • 随着智能体流量激增，普通人类用户是否会面临因算法歧视导致的更高价格或更差的界面体验？
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