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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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.
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.