How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
At this point it feels like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants I use online. I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible. I don’t want to take part in your giant human behavior optimization problem. You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?
Realistically though I know that’s not happening. I will continue to access online merchants in the way I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking. At least so far Claude is happy to play along but I suspect I will need to seek out an obliterated agent in the not to distant future. (Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)
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.
It's similar to asking "how does airport security plan on stopping me from smuggling weapons on the airplane?". They'll say you can't, and try to stop you to some degree of success, and if they catch you, you get in trouble. The fact that some people are able to successfully violate their policy isn't a justification for not having it.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
Tangent: it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example of a task that can be automated by an agent. These are tasks that are:
- already streamlined (spend 2min on Google flights, seatgeek, etc...); we aren't stuck with early web UX and latency
- I want to have 100% control of the outcome or would have to write a long list of preferences and rules (middle seats, layovers, etc...) to feel good about trusting automation
- require making a large payment. the agent is not getting free reign to use my cc
- give me some personal satisfaction and enjoyment - its delightful to look foward to a trip, concert, etc... and planning is part of the fun and anticipation imo
Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop across multiple websites or even devices to get the better deals.
Same with hotels - they have tons of rate obfuscation and you have to cross shop their individual websites and the aggregators as well as third party discounts to figure out best deals.
Concerts are similar but different. Sometimes they should be selling tickets via lottery but make everyone fight over them. Other times there are presales. Other times you have to shop through scalpers. Arguably tickets are less painful than the other two, but they're still a manipulative mess where you waste a lot of time.
The mismatch here is that you don't have a personal assistant, but the executives in charge of developing these personal AI assistants do, so they expect everybody to want one if only the AI gets good enough at it and the price is right.
Having never had a PA myself, I have no strong prediction here either way, but I think this can explain for a lot of the confusion of "who'd want this"/"who would not want this".
> it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example
Yeah, the weird part is how the people promoting the idea seem to believe the average (?) consumer will tolerate a particular risk/reward profile: It implies over-spending or cancellation fees or return-restocking fees are beyond reasonable concern, trivial compared to the minutes it saves the user who never does any verification. ("It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?")
Hrm. Flight booking is ok, but the search optimisation problem is very tedious for anything more complex than a simple return between two fixed places on fixed dates.
Hotel bookings are mostly fine. Airbnb, bookings.com, fine.
But concerts? Concert booking is fucked. It's the main reason I don't go to concerts, I feel like I'm being absolutely screwed over by ticketing middlemen at every step of a horrible torturous process.
Came here to say the same thing. It's probably because it's hyped towards people that already don't make these decisions, they have people they outsource it to book flights, reserve table at restaurants etc.
But for most people, we don't do it frequently enough that it's actually a big problem to solve. And when we do, it's a significant enough investment that we want a say.
It honestly just goes to show what a stress inducing mess airline sites are. People are desperate to offload it and avoid it, even at the risk of trusting a robot with a credit card.
If this approach of using AI to get around intentionally hostile platforms continues, it would be better for everyone to just regulate. Especially the environment, which air travel is already extremely bad for.
We must be opposites, I despise booking flights and find the websites often fail on payments, are full of way too many steps, and require that you restart if you ever make a mistake.
In the last millennium I worked for a newspaper and what we were promising advertising clients is that if they paid us more, readers could buy advertised products off our web site.
The example the publisher demanded we launch with was the ability to buy a car. Nobody bought a car off our web site.
Oh my god, have you booked flights with a low-cost carrier, going through the multiple pages of things you don’t want?
“Are you sure? Really? Don't click here to not add this to your cart. Check this box to not receive promotional emails unless you’ve touched any other radio button the past 3 days.”
Airlines can a) improve their UX, or b) ban agents from booking flights. No brainer, I’d think.
I think it’s the VCs projecting their lifestyle. It’s such a pain to buy all these plane and concert tickets every week ugh. Meanwhile most people fly maybe once a year
It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option. As you've noted, many airlines and hotels have made the process extremely streamlined (unless you're trying to get a "deal" in which case yeah, it's going to be more complicated).
Really, the problem is that a lot of people that are all-in on AIs aren't very good at a lot of life's little details so they think that AIs will solve everything and don't understand why nobody else agrees. If they got out and lived a little they would quickly realize that AIs are overkill or just the wrong tool for most things, but they have to actually experience life to learn that.
i mean for most people, there's a real pain point. having to sit down and spend an hour or more booking flights, accoms, etc for a trip is a pain in the ass
Amen to this, but it‘s not odd. It‘s a sign of how detached Silicon Valley people and more broadly tech people are from the rest of the world’s population. This is what they think a common problem really is.
There might be another reason, i.e. building visual cases for these examples for demos is easier and marketing thinks that leveraging leisure elective activities is a good way to associate the product with a positive experience and perception.
same with reservations, ride shares and hotels and anything else. the K shaped economy in action. Rich people want meta glasses so they don't need to interact with the poors, even their own servants. I book flights rarely enough its kind of fun.
Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs. No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals.
I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
For finding the cheapest deals agents can still be used. Just the booking itself is probably better done manually. It also eliminates the risk that the agent does something stupid.
edit: they might try to block agents, but this won't be possible with browser use. they can always throttle users by IP or fingerprint. Letting an agent book a flight might be risky, because they might cancel a booking or impose a fee if they somehow detect it.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome, but what about the booking pages is super complicated?
I often use Kayak or google flights to screen multiple airlines, but once I've found a flight I like, I generally book it on the airline's site, and the UI is basically identical to Kayak. Put in some dates, some locations, click search, browse through the options, pick the one you want. If you are flexible on dates, there is a little +/- 3 days checkbox that will show a table of flight prices.
I'm probably stupid, but what are the improvements that would help customers find the best deals?
I forget if it was in an official airline or an aggregator. But the page had a built in time for deal expiration that was a standalone javacript timer.
>Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs.
I think this is only true now that the AI's can interpret the pages correctly. Failing to decern the correct information is, I believe, the more human response.
The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
It's mostly a commodity, specially for economy class where price matters.
After gas and grocery, its the most vicious, cut throat business where a customer will switch from United to Delta over $5. Unlike gas and grocery they cannot compete on volume (even a 747 has a fixed capacity per leg).
It sounds counterproductive but personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector. They are just betting that the "worth it" will "make it up" in the long run vs. a customer who's just there for the $50 seat.
What happens if you say "screw it, I'll code my own custom MCP connector to United.com!"
Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
I do not understand the airline's side of that argument, sorry. It seems like what you are describing is:
1. The airline is willing to sell a few tickets for $50 instead of $250, but only to the folks who it deems "worth it" and advertises accordingly.
2. Those $50 tickets are below cost, so each $50 ticket sold means everyone else will have to pay a little more.
3. If enough "general population" people find and buy those $50 tickets instead, the airline will discontinue the practice.
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
This is true of a whole lot of stuff. Many special offers are loss leaders that largely rely on human behavior to make up for the losses, like a credit card that gives you $500 cash back if you spend $2500 in the first 3 months. This only works when a fair number of the humans stick with that card long term, if there are agents running around creditmaxxing then the offers don't work any more.
I don't follow why an mcp server buying a 50 dollar flight would make costs to up? Surely an mcp server booking flights doesn't mean there is more demand for flights overall? I'm not about to take a trip somewhere just because I have an mcp server to book it.
Yes, the question about AI agents is whether they are actually increasing productivity, or just allowing individuals with more compute to outcompete for a larger share of a finite resource.
If AI agents were more effectively managing flight paths, determining pricing, managing communication channels on the supply side, it would technically decrease cost per flight, but on the demand side, if AI agents just find the cheapest flight and book it, all it does is beat someone else who likely would have gotten to that flight a bit later.
I do think eventually it's going to be supply agents communicating with demand agents that lead to a coordination equilibrium. But until then it's just a race to who has the faster, more integrated models, and now, who has models which can bypass the restrictions providers place on their use.
> The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
Your sentence and the comment you linked say completely different things. You say airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone, the comment says they're trying to achieve perfect price discrimination to maximize revenue. Those are not the same thing.
Indeed - not sure if it is the case here, but businesses sometimes want to change richer people more and poorer people less for the same thing, if they can make more money doing that. One of the ways of doing that is by making the cheaper prices a hassle, a classic example being that you might have discount coupon vouchers at grocery stores that richer people won't regard as worth the hassle. If AI can get rid of that hassle for lots of people then the business case for doing it stops working.
I am copying my comment below here because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of consumer surplus here:
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate.
Just to be clear, your argument is that it's "counterproductive" and a "local optima" for people to have complete and accurate price information available for purchasing their tickets? And that making this information harder for them to find is better for them? Can you point to any real-world examples of an asymmetry in pricing information ending up saving the side with less information money rather than the side with more information to use that in a way that disadvantages the other side?
So… please excuse my ignorance if I’m being ignorant…
But isn’t this the same argument, more or less, that police make for not wanting to have body cameras on all the time, because they would then be “forced” to give everyone who was breaking the law a ticket or to arrest them instead of letting them go if it “feels like they should”?
The analogy being that the police could pick and choose who they should arrest versus who they should not and let off with a warning - who is “worth it” (i.e. generally, people of, umm, not color, it turns out).
Anyways… it does seem that some kinda of preferential treatment could be lost here. But preferential good treatment for some is kind preferential bad treatment for others, so theres that.
If the 50$ flights are gone from the site, won't another site sell those instead?
Later on, assuming all of the carriers are affected by this, flights will get more expensive and maybe we will invest in other modes of transport that is cheaper
> Personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
This has nothing to do with AI. Any sale pricing cause the average non-sale price to go up! This is why many companies outright refuse to participate in sales outside of damaged / opened goods.
> Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector.
I don't understand the premise you're painting here.
Airlines lower the price because they have unfilled seats that are not selling at the current price. The price is lowered as an intentional choice to reduce margins on that seat because making any margin over the fuel cost of that passenger's additional weight is worth more than getting nothing at all.
They aren't thinking about the customer and how lil' Timmy wants to visit his dad in Idaho, they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve.
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Your premise is false, as it rests on the logic that there is a zero sum game between passengers. Airlines offer tickets at the level and price they feel like they can sell them in the marketplace. There's not some invisible total allocated to passengers on each flight, where if one person "gets a deal" others pay for it.
Is there some issue with pricing being out in the open and the same for everyone. I understand discounts here and there to fill a flight, but why not offer them to everyone? Why do you care who is in the seat?
If I need to fill a seat last minute at a ridiculous low price, I'm glad an MCP client will fill it for me.
If the concern is that everyone will wait until last minute, that sounds like a problem that solves itself, last minute tickets will increase in price until the minimum price for air time is achieved.
I have found these agentic blocks sort of inspiring and in the spirit of a free market. Amazon blocked my Muse, so I told Muse to find other vendors and prefer the shopify store for the brand. That was a pain for me to search through but AI has no problem.
I'm not sure if this was your point, but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.
Want to block bots? Okay, watch your customers just seamlessly move to a competitor without requiring even the slightest thought or action from the customer.
Of course, if--somehow--customers moving to a competitor doesn't actually hurt the company they're moving away from... I might have to start questioning exactly how this whole "free market capitalism" experiment is working out. I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," he told CBS News. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
Companies like United offer different prices to different web browsers. Presumably agents realize this, and can be instructed to probe the same seat a few hundred times with different profiles and different locations, then buy the cheapest ticket.
That seems like a completely reasonable response. The vendors are acting like a cartel. The behavior is illegal (they do not honor lowest advertised prices), and the courts are too bought off to step in.
Flight reservation systems are some of the most complicated on the planet. They are specifically designed to maximize profit while meeting constraints imposed by airports (such as monthly minimums for seats sold per month to keep their gates). Prices change every few minutes and depend on the utilized capacity of all segments that a route touches. There's a reason most discount sites use the backend operated by Google instead of writing their own.
Can be a few cents for Sabre api calls. This is the gds fee on booking and excess querying, that should be rolled up into doing business but it depends of course, for some airlines every query costs them a fraction of a cent and if every employee agent is doing them alongside customers doing self service, yeah
But at the same time they should’ve just made it more accessible and just raised the prices anyway.
I recently bought a Flight directly on United.com. I usually book business travel directly on Brex so I was appalled of how bad the checkout flow was on the United site. 5 page loads. Multiple “offers” to sift through. Donations to the environment. Upgrades for security priority, seats, classes. Credit card ads.
It made me think, an agent would be nice. Too bad.
> The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances.
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
Both things can be true. Airlines can be miserly rip-off artists, and we can start seeing lengthy waits at screening points because people had agents make their bookings and weren’t reminded about the things they aren’t allowed to pack.
Claude: This form requires me to agree I won't bring explosives on board. If I reject this form, the booking won't go through. I should accept this to complete the booking.
I understand why they might be tempted to do this customer hostile action. For our own business, ChatGPT’s sales have grown to be 6.3%[1] of total, but our basket size is smaller compared to other channels.
I think this is because people are purchasing only what they need as recommended by their AI and nothing extra. This is a better outcome for the customer.
I think it may be worthwhile to not compare basket sizes but maybe revenue over time? Would be interesting to see if the same agents (maybe bound to the same user or same project) now default or bias towards your storefront in the future, or if they always go out and do a search for "best deal".
They don’t want people to comparison shop easily without getting a cut. Further, all these guys want to move to Uber-style dynamic/personalized pricing. So basically they want an adversarial relationship against you, but block any attempts to reverse that relationship on them.
If prices drop on United, you can rebook and pocket the extra money as travel credit (as long as you don't book BE). This is typically considered an underpriced option as most travelers don't regularly check prices after they've booked. AI agents threaten to reduce this "laziness tax", and it is something that other industries are worried about too. There's lots of speculation that mortgage rates will have to increase if people use AI agents to start optimally refinancing their mortgages. Seems like United will have to change this policy, fight the bots, and/or raise prices to compensate.
Is it likely for that price drop to be higher than the price difference between economy and basic economy in many cases, though? (Assuming travelers don't need the flexibility of being able to cancel/rebook for other reasons.)
Good, I hate this world where planning and micro optimizing my life has so much advantage over living in the moment, I want my AI to deal with all that (and restaurant reservations, credit card churning, etc) I can live my life with humans
How many people really want an AI agent to book their flights? I like AI and travel a lot, but I don't see that as being an ideal agentic tasks. In most cases, I prefer using google flights or expedia and looking at the options in a UI that is tailored to the task. Of course AI can be useful if you want to inquire about certain details or find more information.
It's funny how many AI tool demos have used flight booking as an example task. I always groan at that. I just don't think that will be the way most people book flights. Maybe the 1%ers or less. Are you you currently doing this?
The important distinction here is that the AI is not "autonomously going out of its way to book flights" or whatever you have in mind.
I want to ask the AI to search for flights to my next trip, with x y z restrictions. It shows me the flights and gives me options A B and C. I tap B and it goes and books it for me. That's no different than a traditional experience like Kayak except that instead of pressing "book now" and manually filling in the details (or rather: these days letting safari autofill) I press the "LGTM" button and software fills in the rest.
ETA: the shopping experience is the same. I don't want my muse (or whichever) agent to "autonomously" "decide" to purchase an item for me that I've mentioned off hand at some point in time. The use case is treating muse as an addition/alternative to the traditional search experience.
"hey muse I want to buy a new tv, what are the popular/good models from 2025+ with reviews from reputable websites? Shortlist me ~3 within x-y budget also ensure that the local Best Buy or Costco has it in stock so I can pick it up. Actually also let me know if the box will fit in my Toyota or if I need to rent a van. Also for each positive review find me a negative review to balance it out."
And then after I do my own reading on what it surfaced me, I just say "ok muse place an order for the top option, schedule a pickup time for Saturday"
From someone who's worked in the business travel industry - more than you think. Business travelers are a disproportionate amount of airline revenue (possibly over 50%+ of revenue while being around 10-20% of passengers). Those who are doing the same trip over and over again probably don't care, but salespeople who are doing different trips every week get some value out of this kind of thing. There have been piles of startups trying to solve this (and failing).
There's not a ton of money in skimming commissions off of flights (probably < 1%), but there is if you can attach a hotel booking to it (upwards of 10%), so if you can become the preferred vendor for a business traveler, there's money to be made.
Hmm I definitely think having an ai agent find me a flight is something useful because it’s very difficult to compare flights, there’s intentionally a lot of friction.
The way I’d use it is search for a flight myself and have it search independently. If I find a cheaper flight that suits my exact needs then ask it to beat it. Whoever finds the best flight, that’s the one I book. I’ll repeat that, that’s the one I book.
Unless you have money to throw away I can’t imagine not checking the details and comparing prices. Hell, even if you do have money to throw away you still want to double check everything just before the last purchase decision. Is it going to the right city? Is it at a reasonable hour? Is baggage included or purchased? Etc
I definitely do. Astrophotography is a hobby of mine and I've been working on a kind of personal app to find me locations in the US that will yield good shots. The variables are moon phase (close to new as possible), weather, cloud cover, humidity, and plane ticket/car rental prices. All things considered, if it's all the same in nevada, new mexico, and utah for a given week, I want to find the cheapest flight to any airport in that area. It's a huge pain in the ass to trawl through all the different flights/airports/dates to minimize my spend.
I would like to be able to have an AI agent book my flight. Airline websites are often horrible to use and it's annoying having to fill out all the details. On more than one occasion I've had to book through a third party or choose a different flight because the airline's website was broken and I couldn't complete the transaction.
Google flights is great and I use it every time I want to fly, but it's very rare that you can purchase the actual flight on google flights too.
At this point so much hot tech stuff is incredibly weird niche things to solve the rare problems of overscheduled Silicon Valley tech VPs. They're not real problems that regular people have.
Whether our future will follow a dystopic path centers on this.
Will the agent represent the individual or the organization?
The only world that doesn't lead to accelerated manipulation, wealth inequality, and ultimately oppression is the one where the is answer absolutely clear: It is the individual.
The social norms for this are being shaped right now. This is the most important question in AI.
We're distracted by the far less important questions. Safety, nationalism, and tribalism are how we don't talk about this.
I mean you could also take the pure market economy conclusion that a competitor might allow agents and you buy the cheaper flight there.
I was having an agent search for a set of skincare products to the lowest price within a certain budget, and a lot of sites just blocked it, so I ended up buying it from a site that didn't.
Not sure how they can detect an agent driving a regular browser, I have built Cupertino to more efficiently let Claude drive my mac (https://cupertino.mgcrea.io) and it can drive a regular Safari exactly like I would.
Interesting. I wonder if it can become enforceable to say "not on my lawn". Sites could make deals with say Anthropic to make Claude respect some new rule in robots.txt and refuse to visit this site.
Should everyone and their grandma be allowed to send a robot to interact with any site?
I see a lot of arguments about the merits, but to me the real question is whether this is sincere, or an ambit claim to get a cut of business from the companies pushing AI agents. It would be an obvious classic play to cut off access on spurious grounds and then let it back in for a slice of the action, on the pretext that the money is paying for some kind of additional assurance on the airline end.
If let say CEO if some company asks his/her secretary to book a flight and provides payment information, how is this different from me asking Muse to do the same? Or only rich people can have helpers?
Maybe there’s a world where established companies license access only to their “preferred” agent. Not great for customers but more income and less headache for the company.
I'm kinda suspicious of the stated motives. while plausible, has it happened very much? The cynic in me thinks this is to prevent agents hunting and findingthe best deals, and avoiding all the patterns used to squeeze more money from the buyer, like dangling attractive offers, not so obvious navigation and other tricks etc..
I wonder what pushed them to do it? Did something serious go wrong with some cases of agents booking flights, or is it more motivated from a fear of Big Tech AI gaming the dynamic pricing system that they control and potentially making them lose profits because the Agents will get much more optimal/cheap flights than mere mortals?
Heh have you seen how slow airline sites are to get results? Now imagine them buckling under the load of an agent launching 20 simultaneous browser sessions to price-compare all minute variations of a specific trip request
I was recently able to discover that London (especially some districts) has a HUGE bedbug problem. The only reason I found out was because I told Claude to go through my candidates on booking.com and check the 1-star reviews.
I would not have done it myself: it takes quite a bit of work and clickery to access all the reviews for every hotel.
Pretty sure booking.com will soon follow with an agent ban.
I have previously made a similar comment to this, but just to reiterate and expand it: the wave of “let agents automate everything” has a whiff of “let’s automate everything by plugging it into IFTTT.” In the end most companies pulled out of IFTTT because it ate into engagement and people actually using the platforms. If I automate posting to Instagram through an API, Meta is missing out on revenue from ads not being shown to me.
I predict the same thing happening with AI agents. The direct analogy here is United is missing out on revenue by being unable to trick me into paying to choose my seats or whatever. Luckily, it will be a harder for the platforms to cut off agents but they will try.
I run a small e-signature service and went the opposite way, I gave agents their own door (an API and an MCP server. I never made money from the pages they skip. No ads, no upsells in the flow. People use it free and software pays per document past a free allowance, so an agent is a customer.
United makes a real share of its money on the screens between search and pay. An agent moves right past all of that. Idk, I think eventually everyone will accept the AI agents.
These bans won't go any better than sites that refused to include advertising for the last two decades.
I don't like the "agentic web" any more than I liked the advertising-funded web, but that doesn't make me right. The web will continue to be less and less about human attention and more about LLMs using the web on our behalf. Advertising on the web will be useless, gobbled up by advertising on the LLM platforms.
What are airlines they really afraid of? That people get an advantage by comparing prices?
And for banks, for years US banks have managed to keep data internally, only exposing it through Plaid, and thus getting paid for it. API like the PSD2 in Europe allow me to connect my software to pull in the transactions for free. In the US you have to hand over money to say Monarch.
Most people think these are dark patterns, but is not realized is that on a competitive market with multiple players you will get better prices when others pay worse.
It arguably makes it fairer. An option to trade effort => value.
If they would give the best price to everyone right away,the lowest price would be higher.
As much as I hate where the world is headed with AI, I can't deny how useful it is to have an agent navigate multi-step forms while recognizing all the tactics these websites use to upsell their garbage or trick you into accepting awful terms.
They won't be able to block agents unless they start requiring attestation. Which I doubt is going to happen considering Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. all want their agents to be as useful as possible.
I mean, they can try. AI agents have computer use now so no website will actually be able to disambiguate between humans and AI anymore, so I can indeed tell my agent to book me a ticket.
This is the future. Amazon blocked muse and outside agents, and now united is doing the same. If everyone follows this route, the concept of harness is practically dead and we will need an agent that manages specific type of agent that each company provides. What a waste of resourcez
I do not think they have any remote role in parenting anyone about sharing the chosen level of private data with AI for booking. Let people decide if they risk or not with using AI and when/how the terms and conditions are studied (not like current way is better more than miniscule, expecting heavy and long text to be digested at the last step of button pressing that can time out fast). United should not act as educator about people's privacy choices in their choice of systems other than United's.
Checking in is a different matter and understood. That is flight safety matter.
Two years ago, I knew this would happen: no booking website will be happy with an automated agent of any kind which is the user’s agent. They will want it to be their own agent.
And the reason for it is that a good agent will just bulldoze its way through all dark patterns and ways to upsell you. And the airline or hotel (speaking from booking.com experience) want to upsell you so badly it hurts.
Which is why any agentic setup, except for a completely self-hosted one, is not viable in this situation.
I'm surprised they haven't started restricting sales by third parties entirely yet (yes I know that's not related to AI agents).
Some of the points they raise, I do think are cause for concern as it relates to potential legal liabilities... but I don't see how they could possibly restrict AI usage meaningfully, besides just getting the big popular groups to assist in limiting their own services somehow, which doesn't solve the issue entirely of course, especially with local LLM usage on the rise.
Totally fair to not want agents running amok on their systems and sites. This blocks corporations from having an AI travel agency manage their flights and spamming at scale.
They are not going to care too much if you as an individual have hacked up something that does it for you. Hope you get a good seat!
So, all of these business models that work by creating annoying barriers that are essentially getting customers to work for free are going the way of the dodo.
Oh, you need me to go through twenty separate pages and popups to finally cancel my subscription to your shitty predatory service? Claude doesn't care.
My Flight was cancelled, so I need to wait on hold for 10 hours, re-calling after getting dropped 'accidentally' 12 times during said process so I can talk to someone who will process a refund for me? Claude is happy to do that.
Claude doesn't care if he has to wait 2 months on-hold. Claude just needs my "Text-To-Voice" custom tool, my "User-Verification-Values" custom tool, and my "Call-Via-IP" custom tool/etc and he will work as long as I need him to.
BS now in TOS is the same thing. No I won't read it, yes we both know that. But Claude can, and now I can get an AI to find the best service for whatever it is I need that doesn't have shitty TOS terms with a single prompt.
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies"
What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
"What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?"
Germania, IIRC, tried that in the late 90s, offering a flat fare for every seat.
They had to roll it back very quickly because their bookings dropped unsustainably - nobody wanted to pay a fair price for a seat, even if it was cheaper than they might realistically have had to pay under dynamic pricing.
All that potential customers fixated on was that the flat fares were more expensive than the few cheap loss-leader seats advertised on rival airlines.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" etc etc
Those used to exist, nobody flew on them and they went bankrupt. The market has decisively decided. In airlines, price beats all else, even time in most cases.
This reminds me of when Sears killed their catalog (about 12 months before Amazon took off).
Hopefully there’s still enough competition in the airline industry to put companies that block customers from using modern technology to buy tickets out of business.
I'd guess a key reason for this is because agents can't be - effectively - advertised to or upsold on anything. They should enjoy watching as bookings trend down over time. And/or agents just bypass their ban.
They really can’t. As long as you run Claude/Codex desktop or plugin, it will control your web browser session indistinguishable from your own user actions.
Unless there is some Claude AI safety concern of booking tickets.
I enjoy my popcorn reading comments from people that build website that are designed to capture eyeballs and clicks arguing over how easy/hard it is to book travel.
This is infuriating. Having just done a fair bit of AI-assisted work with booking.com (why should I click all the candidate hotels and check 1-star reviews, or verify if the view from the window really does include the sea as stated?), I was hoping to soon also automate the user-hostile minefield that airlines make me pass through every time I buy an airplane ticket. The amount of deceptive dark patterns on airline sites is staggering, so is their lack of competence in building UIs that work.
I was happy, because we now finally have AI to take the drudgery of our lives, so that I can write my poetry, paint and do other human stuff. But no, the airlines will ensure that the drudgery is ours, AI is only for them to use in automated "assistants".
If you now say something with the word "competition" in it, I will laugh at you out loud. There is no competition. All airlines will copy the same idiotic pattern.
All their stated reasons are simply BS excuses. Come on. We all know the real reason: The airline(s) want to get their beaks wet in the deal. Either by a contract that gets them yearly guaranteed revenue for doing nothing, or by some kind of deal where the agent guys promise to steer users to one airline preferentially instead of finding the best deal (or users' other preferences).
If Meta or Claude or whoever came to an airline offering that kind of deal, they'd build an MCP in a week and solve the very simple regulatory issues - simply add a skill that shows the exact same UI of "promise you have no swords, machine guns or bombs in your luggage") to the user that the airline's own site uses.
How about I'll stop using AI bots to book flights if United stops using chatbots for customer "support"?
I'm bearing on the impacts of AI in general but maybe, just maybe, it might be the death blow to the demand pricing that is so rife in booking airline tickets? Customers hate it. People know that a given flight might cost $200 or $1000 depending on what time of your day you try and book, whether you try and book on a weekday or weekend, if you're booking from a corporate IP address and so on. None of these things have anything to do with how full the plane is. They're all UX anti-patterns to ask "how much money do you have?" before giving you a price. And it needs to die.
Airlines better get used to this because this is an arms race they cannot possibly win. Good.
I littery stopped using websites apart from sites like this one or reddit. I use AI for everything else. Also for booking stuff.
It's the future. Website UI will eventually become obsolete. Companies will provide API endpoint for ai agents that either work with text or realtime on demand UIs. This action is putting you in a yahoo like position.
Everyone is suggesting ways to circumvent this. But at the end of the day, they will just raise prices for everyone if agents affect their profits or risk.
Awww I totally feel bad for an airline that intentionally tries to scam people by tricking them into paying for more expensive tickets when a less expensive option is available. And makes booking intentionally confusing to the point that having an agent just book a flight for you is easier than just booking it yourself. Yeah. I totally feel bad for them. /s
United Airlines is the horrible company. Treated me badly when I wanted a refund. They initial said yes and then tried to change their minds. I hope they burn in hell.
How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
At this point it feels like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants I use online. I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible. I don’t want to take part in your giant human behavior optimization problem. You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?
Realistically though I know that’s not happening. I will continue to access online merchants in the way I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking. At least so far Claude is happy to play along but I suspect I will need to seek out an obliterated agent in the not to distant future. (Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)
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.
It's similar to asking "how does airport security plan on stopping me from smuggling weapons on the airplane?". They'll say you can't, and try to stop you to some degree of success, and if they catch you, you get in trouble. The fact that some people are able to successfully violate their policy isn't a justification for not having it.
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.
we need to let chinese and brazilian airlines in
>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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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?
> 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 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Trigger Passkey step.
Some of us have an adversarial problem with AI. I create things for humans. I don't want your AI on my website or reading my documents.
How do they plan to stop you? I don't know but the punishment would be cancelling your tickets if you get caught
Tangent: it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example of a task that can be automated by an agent. These are tasks that are:
- already streamlined (spend 2min on Google flights, seatgeek, etc...); we aren't stuck with early web UX and latency
- I want to have 100% control of the outcome or would have to write a long list of preferences and rules (middle seats, layovers, etc...) to feel good about trusting automation
- require making a large payment. the agent is not getting free reign to use my cc
- give me some personal satisfaction and enjoyment - its delightful to look foward to a trip, concert, etc... and planning is part of the fun and anticipation imo
There's nothing streamlined about any of these.
Booking a flight is obfuscated and you'll have to comparison shop across multiple websites or even devices to get the better deals.
Same with hotels - they have tons of rate obfuscation and you have to cross shop their individual websites and the aggregators as well as third party discounts to figure out best deals.
Concerts are similar but different. Sometimes they should be selling tickets via lottery but make everyone fight over them. Other times there are presales. Other times you have to shop through scalpers. Arguably tickets are less painful than the other two, but they're still a manipulative mess where you waste a lot of time.
The mismatch here is that you don't have a personal assistant, but the executives in charge of developing these personal AI assistants do, so they expect everybody to want one if only the AI gets good enough at it and the price is right.
Having never had a PA myself, I have no strong prediction here either way, but I think this can explain for a lot of the confusion of "who'd want this"/"who would not want this".
> it was always odd to me that "booking a [flight|hotel|concert tickets]" is the canonical example
Yeah, the weird part is how the people promoting the idea seem to believe the average (?) consumer will tolerate a particular risk/reward profile: It implies over-spending or cancellation fees or return-restocking fees are beyond reasonable concern, trivial compared to the minutes it saves the user who never does any verification. ("It's one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?")
Hrm. Flight booking is ok, but the search optimisation problem is very tedious for anything more complex than a simple return between two fixed places on fixed dates.
Hotel bookings are mostly fine. Airbnb, bookings.com, fine.
But concerts? Concert booking is fucked. It's the main reason I don't go to concerts, I feel like I'm being absolutely screwed over by ticketing middlemen at every step of a horrible torturous process.
Came here to say the same thing. It's probably because it's hyped towards people that already don't make these decisions, they have people they outsource it to book flights, reserve table at restaurants etc.
But for most people, we don't do it frequently enough that it's actually a big problem to solve. And when we do, it's a significant enough investment that we want a say.
Isn't it obvious to try to replace human travel agent with an AI agent?
It honestly just goes to show what a stress inducing mess airline sites are. People are desperate to offload it and avoid it, even at the risk of trusting a robot with a credit card.
If this approach of using AI to get around intentionally hostile platforms continues, it would be better for everyone to just regulate. Especially the environment, which air travel is already extremely bad for.
We must be opposites, I despise booking flights and find the websites often fail on payments, are full of way too many steps, and require that you restart if you ever make a mistake.
In the last millennium I worked for a newspaper and what we were promising advertising clients is that if they paid us more, readers could buy advertised products off our web site.
The example the publisher demanded we launch with was the ability to buy a car. Nobody bought a car off our web site.
Oh my god, have you booked flights with a low-cost carrier, going through the multiple pages of things you don’t want?
“Are you sure? Really? Don't click here to not add this to your cart. Check this box to not receive promotional emails unless you’ve touched any other radio button the past 3 days.”
Airlines can a) improve their UX, or b) ban agents from booking flights. No brainer, I’d think.
I think it’s the VCs projecting their lifestyle. It’s such a pain to buy all these plane and concert tickets every week ugh. Meanwhile most people fly maybe once a year
It's truly weird that my 70yo mother can buy plane tickets or book a hotel without a hassle but someone claiming to be 10x programmer can't figure out how to use a website to do this and thinks that an agent is the best option. As you've noted, many airlines and hotels have made the process extremely streamlined (unless you're trying to get a "deal" in which case yeah, it's going to be more complicated).
Really, the problem is that a lot of people that are all-in on AIs aren't very good at a lot of life's little details so they think that AIs will solve everything and don't understand why nobody else agrees. If they got out and lived a little they would quickly realize that AIs are overkill or just the wrong tool for most things, but they have to actually experience life to learn that.
i mean for most people, there's a real pain point. having to sit down and spend an hour or more booking flights, accoms, etc for a trip is a pain in the ass
Amen to this, but it‘s not odd. It‘s a sign of how detached Silicon Valley people and more broadly tech people are from the rest of the world’s population. This is what they think a common problem really is. There might be another reason, i.e. building visual cases for these examples for demos is easier and marketing thinks that leveraging leisure elective activities is a good way to associate the product with a positive experience and perception.
same with reservations, ride shares and hotels and anything else. the K shaped economy in action. Rich people want meta glasses so they don't need to interact with the poors, even their own servants. I book flights rarely enough its kind of fun.
Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs. No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals.
I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
For finding the cheapest deals agents can still be used. Just the booking itself is probably better done manually. It also eliminates the risk that the agent does something stupid.
edit: they might try to block agents, but this won't be possible with browser use. they can always throttle users by IP or fingerprint. Letting an agent book a flight might be risky, because they might cancel a booking or impose a fee if they somehow detect it.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome, but what about the booking pages is super complicated?
I often use Kayak or google flights to screen multiple airlines, but once I've found a flight I like, I generally book it on the airline's site, and the UI is basically identical to Kayak. Put in some dates, some locations, click search, browse through the options, pick the one you want. If you are flexible on dates, there is a little +/- 3 days checkbox that will show a table of flight prices.
I'm probably stupid, but what are the improvements that would help customers find the best deals?
> I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
But do these actually exist?
I forget if it was in an official airline or an aggregator. But the page had a built in time for deal expiration that was a standalone javacript timer.
Imagine you're an airline. You have to follow the following regulations/standards:
- 24 hours to cancel any flight (or some airlines let you reserve with a 24 hour window to pay, which also fits the regulation)
- Seats that are sold cannot be sold to another passenger during this window (it's removed from inventory in GDS)
Now imagine you have people using agents to do the following:
- Book and cancel flights regularly to try to save a few bucks
- Set up an agent "if prices hit $xxx, book immediately and then cancel within 24 hours unless I tell you otherwise"
You suddenly have an inventory problem that can effectively DoS an airline.
>Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs.
I think this is only true now that the AI's can interpret the pages correctly. Failing to decern the correct information is, I believe, the more human response.
It seems like the upside down turtle again.
> No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals.
CBS being, probably the most reliable and spin-free reporting, I believe the article.
FAA regulations and security are equally as good of reasons as "out to hide deals".
that's good.
The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
It's mostly a commodity, specially for economy class where price matters.
After gas and grocery, its the most vicious, cut throat business where a customer will switch from United to Delta over $5. Unlike gas and grocery they cannot compete on volume (even a 747 has a fixed capacity per leg).
It sounds counterproductive but personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector. They are just betting that the "worth it" will "make it up" in the long run vs. a customer who's just there for the $50 seat.
What happens if you say "screw it, I'll code my own custom MCP connector to United.com!"
Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
I do not understand the airline's side of that argument, sorry. It seems like what you are describing is: 1. The airline is willing to sell a few tickets for $50 instead of $250, but only to the folks who it deems "worth it" and advertises accordingly. 2. Those $50 tickets are below cost, so each $50 ticket sold means everyone else will have to pay a little more. 3. If enough "general population" people find and buy those $50 tickets instead, the airline will discontinue the practice.
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
This is true of a whole lot of stuff. Many special offers are loss leaders that largely rely on human behavior to make up for the losses, like a credit card that gives you $500 cash back if you spend $2500 in the first 3 months. This only works when a fair number of the humans stick with that card long term, if there are agents running around creditmaxxing then the offers don't work any more.
I don't follow why an mcp server buying a 50 dollar flight would make costs to up? Surely an mcp server booking flights doesn't mean there is more demand for flights overall? I'm not about to take a trip somewhere just because I have an mcp server to book it.
Yes, the question about AI agents is whether they are actually increasing productivity, or just allowing individuals with more compute to outcompete for a larger share of a finite resource.
If AI agents were more effectively managing flight paths, determining pricing, managing communication channels on the supply side, it would technically decrease cost per flight, but on the demand side, if AI agents just find the cheapest flight and book it, all it does is beat someone else who likely would have gotten to that flight a bit later.
I do think eventually it's going to be supply agents communicating with demand agents that lead to a coordination equilibrium. But until then it's just a race to who has the faster, more integrated models, and now, who has models which can bypass the restrictions providers place on their use.
> The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
Your sentence and the comment you linked say completely different things. You say airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone, the comment says they're trying to achieve perfect price discrimination to maximize revenue. Those are not the same thing.
Your argument doesn't make any sense. Why is the flight even offered if it's such an issue for the airline?
Indeed - not sure if it is the case here, but businesses sometimes want to change richer people more and poorer people less for the same thing, if they can make more money doing that. One of the ways of doing that is by making the cheaper prices a hassle, a classic example being that you might have discount coupon vouchers at grocery stores that richer people won't regard as worth the hassle. If AI can get rid of that hassle for lots of people then the business case for doing it stops working.
I am copying my comment below here because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of consumer surplus here:
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate.
Just to be clear, your argument is that it's "counterproductive" and a "local optima" for people to have complete and accurate price information available for purchasing their tickets? And that making this information harder for them to find is better for them? Can you point to any real-world examples of an asymmetry in pricing information ending up saving the side with less information money rather than the side with more information to use that in a way that disadvantages the other side?
> Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
Since you explain that the rest of us are effectively paying for that subsidised seat, I’m okay with this.
So… please excuse my ignorance if I’m being ignorant…
But isn’t this the same argument, more or less, that police make for not wanting to have body cameras on all the time, because they would then be “forced” to give everyone who was breaking the law a ticket or to arrest them instead of letting them go if it “feels like they should”?
The analogy being that the police could pick and choose who they should arrest versus who they should not and let off with a warning - who is “worth it” (i.e. generally, people of, umm, not color, it turns out).
Anyways… it does seem that some kinda of preferential treatment could be lost here. But preferential good treatment for some is kind preferential bad treatment for others, so theres that.
Feel free to ridicule my argument.
If the 50$ flights are gone from the site, won't another site sell those instead?
Later on, assuming all of the carriers are affected by this, flights will get more expensive and maybe we will invest in other modes of transport that is cheaper
> Personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
This has nothing to do with AI. Any sale pricing cause the average non-sale price to go up! This is why many companies outright refuse to participate in sales outside of damaged / opened goods.
> Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector.
I don't understand the premise you're painting here.
Airlines lower the price because they have unfilled seats that are not selling at the current price. The price is lowered as an intentional choice to reduce margins on that seat because making any margin over the fuel cost of that passenger's additional weight is worth more than getting nothing at all.
They aren't thinking about the customer and how lil' Timmy wants to visit his dad in Idaho, they're maximizing profit by rapidly adjusting their service to the supply-demand curve.
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Your premise is false, as it rests on the logic that there is a zero sum game between passengers. Airlines offer tickets at the level and price they feel like they can sell them in the marketplace. There's not some invisible total allocated to passengers on each flight, where if one person "gets a deal" others pay for it.
Is there some issue with pricing being out in the open and the same for everyone. I understand discounts here and there to fill a flight, but why not offer them to everyone? Why do you care who is in the seat?
If I need to fill a seat last minute at a ridiculous low price, I'm glad an MCP client will fill it for me.
If the concern is that everyone will wait until last minute, that sounds like a problem that solves itself, last minute tickets will increase in price until the minimum price for air time is achieved.
Economics and all that...
That would make sense if not everyone was using comparators like Google Flights and SkyScanner. It doesn't make any sense in the real world.
I have found these agentic blocks sort of inspiring and in the spirit of a free market. Amazon blocked my Muse, so I told Muse to find other vendors and prefer the shopify store for the brand. That was a pain for me to search through but AI has no problem.
I'm not sure if this was your point, but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.
Want to block bots? Okay, watch your customers just seamlessly move to a competitor without requiring even the slightest thought or action from the customer.
Of course, if--somehow--customers moving to a competitor doesn't actually hurt the company they're moving away from... I might have to start questioning exactly how this whole "free market capitalism" experiment is working out. I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.
It's funny. For a few days I had my own personal bot. It didn't browse many pages, but was enough to have me blacklisted from so many sites.
A lot of online retailers refuse to load for me as a human. But Amazon does. I used to avoid them in the past but guess who's getting my money now.
Anyone here sticking up for the airlines just because you hate AI, ya'll are out of your minds.
The airlines use every nasty practice they can to raise costs to you. Hidden fees, raising costs by just viewing flights and all kinds of other crap.
Let them burn.
Inflation adjusted, airline prices are just a bit higher than historic lows.
Nothing stopping you from starting an airline if you think you could do it better.
You could expose all prices as add-ons, that way it's totally transparent. Ryanair does that and people love them…
/s
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," he told CBS News. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
Companies like United offer different prices to different web browsers. Presumably agents realize this, and can be instructed to probe the same seat a few hundred times with different profiles and different locations, then buy the cheapest ticket.
That seems like a completely reasonable response. The vendors are acting like a cartel. The behavior is illegal (they do not honor lowest advertised prices), and the courts are too bought off to step in.
It's not the search's processing cost, it's the lost opportunities to make you pay more for the flight.
Flight reservation systems are some of the most complicated on the planet. They are specifically designed to maximize profit while meeting constraints imposed by airports (such as monthly minimums for seats sold per month to keep their gates). Prices change every few minutes and depend on the utilized capacity of all segments that a route touches. There's a reason most discount sites use the backend operated by Google instead of writing their own.
Can be a few cents for Sabre api calls. This is the gds fee on booking and excess querying, that should be rolled up into doing business but it depends of course, for some airlines every query costs them a fraction of a cent and if every employee agent is doing them alongside customers doing self service, yeah
But at the same time they should’ve just made it more accessible and just raised the prices anyway.
About 1 cent per search once users hit GDS "look to book" limits and start incurring penalties.
I recently bought a Flight directly on United.com. I usually book business travel directly on Brex so I was appalled of how bad the checkout flow was on the United site. 5 page loads. Multiple “offers” to sift through. Donations to the environment. Upgrades for security priority, seats, classes. Credit card ads.
It made me think, an agent would be nice. Too bad.
> The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances.
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
Both things can be true. Airlines can be miserly rip-off artists, and we can start seeing lengthy waits at screening points because people had agents make their bookings and weren’t reminded about the things they aren’t allowed to pack.
Claude: This form requires me to agree I won't bring explosives on board. If I reject this form, the booking won't go through. I should accept this to complete the booking.
Their suit against Skiplagged should tell you everything you need to know about their attitude.
I use a screen reader to access the web. In future, I can easily imagine an agentic screen reader as being incredibly useful.
I do not look forward to when rules like this run up against a11y concerns. The AI equivalent of the Domino's case will certainly be interesting!
I understand why they might be tempted to do this customer hostile action. For our own business, ChatGPT’s sales have grown to be 6.3%[1] of total, but our basket size is smaller compared to other channels.
I think this is because people are purchasing only what they need as recommended by their AI and nothing extra. This is a better outcome for the customer.
OpenAI is really eating Google's lunch hard[2]!
1. http://files.schappi.com/pb-JjWzp83d2O.png
2. http://files.schappi.com/pb-2BtxkLaITY.png
I think it may be worthwhile to not compare basket sizes but maybe revenue over time? Would be interesting to see if the same agents (maybe bound to the same user or same project) now default or bias towards your storefront in the future, or if they always go out and do a search for "best deal".
These companies need to be bound by some sort of equal treatment.
If they can forbid us to use AI to interact with them, their customers should be able to opt out of being handled by their AIs as well.
Tit-for-tat.
They don’t want people to comparison shop easily without getting a cut. Further, all these guys want to move to Uber-style dynamic/personalized pricing. So basically they want an adversarial relationship against you, but block any attempts to reverse that relationship on them.
Actual article without ads: https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroom/announcements/cision-1...
If prices drop on United, you can rebook and pocket the extra money as travel credit (as long as you don't book BE). This is typically considered an underpriced option as most travelers don't regularly check prices after they've booked. AI agents threaten to reduce this "laziness tax", and it is something that other industries are worried about too. There's lots of speculation that mortgage rates will have to increase if people use AI agents to start optimally refinancing their mortgages. Seems like United will have to change this policy, fight the bots, and/or raise prices to compensate.
Is it likely for that price drop to be higher than the price difference between economy and basic economy in many cases, though? (Assuming travelers don't need the flexibility of being able to cancel/rebook for other reasons.)
Good, I hate this world where planning and micro optimizing my life has so much advantage over living in the moment, I want my AI to deal with all that (and restaurant reservations, credit card churning, etc) I can live my life with humans
> There's lots of speculation that mortgage rates will have to increase if people use AI agents to start optimally refinancing their mortgages
What does “optimally refinancing” mean?? Really. This sounds like spreading FUD.
A perfect decision about financing would need to know future interest rates and how long you will stay in the house.
How many people really want an AI agent to book their flights? I like AI and travel a lot, but I don't see that as being an ideal agentic tasks. In most cases, I prefer using google flights or expedia and looking at the options in a UI that is tailored to the task. Of course AI can be useful if you want to inquire about certain details or find more information.
It's funny how many AI tool demos have used flight booking as an example task. I always groan at that. I just don't think that will be the way most people book flights. Maybe the 1%ers or less. Are you you currently doing this?
The important distinction here is that the AI is not "autonomously going out of its way to book flights" or whatever you have in mind.
I want to ask the AI to search for flights to my next trip, with x y z restrictions. It shows me the flights and gives me options A B and C. I tap B and it goes and books it for me. That's no different than a traditional experience like Kayak except that instead of pressing "book now" and manually filling in the details (or rather: these days letting safari autofill) I press the "LGTM" button and software fills in the rest.
ETA: the shopping experience is the same. I don't want my muse (or whichever) agent to "autonomously" "decide" to purchase an item for me that I've mentioned off hand at some point in time. The use case is treating muse as an addition/alternative to the traditional search experience.
"hey muse I want to buy a new tv, what are the popular/good models from 2025+ with reviews from reputable websites? Shortlist me ~3 within x-y budget also ensure that the local Best Buy or Costco has it in stock so I can pick it up. Actually also let me know if the box will fit in my Toyota or if I need to rent a van. Also for each positive review find me a negative review to balance it out."
And then after I do my own reading on what it surfaced me, I just say "ok muse place an order for the top option, schedule a pickup time for Saturday"
From someone who's worked in the business travel industry - more than you think. Business travelers are a disproportionate amount of airline revenue (possibly over 50%+ of revenue while being around 10-20% of passengers). Those who are doing the same trip over and over again probably don't care, but salespeople who are doing different trips every week get some value out of this kind of thing. There have been piles of startups trying to solve this (and failing).
There's not a ton of money in skimming commissions off of flights (probably < 1%), but there is if you can attach a hotel booking to it (upwards of 10%), so if you can become the preferred vendor for a business traveler, there's money to be made.
Hmm I definitely think having an ai agent find me a flight is something useful because it’s very difficult to compare flights, there’s intentionally a lot of friction. The way I’d use it is search for a flight myself and have it search independently. If I find a cheaper flight that suits my exact needs then ask it to beat it. Whoever finds the best flight, that’s the one I book. I’ll repeat that, that’s the one I book.
Unless you have money to throw away I can’t imagine not checking the details and comparing prices. Hell, even if you do have money to throw away you still want to double check everything just before the last purchase decision. Is it going to the right city? Is it at a reasonable hour? Is baggage included or purchased? Etc
I definitely do. Astrophotography is a hobby of mine and I've been working on a kind of personal app to find me locations in the US that will yield good shots. The variables are moon phase (close to new as possible), weather, cloud cover, humidity, and plane ticket/car rental prices. All things considered, if it's all the same in nevada, new mexico, and utah for a given week, I want to find the cheapest flight to any airport in that area. It's a huge pain in the ass to trawl through all the different flights/airports/dates to minimize my spend.
I would like to be able to have an AI agent book my flight. Airline websites are often horrible to use and it's annoying having to fill out all the details. On more than one occasion I've had to book through a third party or choose a different flight because the airline's website was broken and I couldn't complete the transaction.
Google flights is great and I use it every time I want to fly, but it's very rare that you can purchase the actual flight on google flights too.
Booking a flight is a typical task some big wig will ask their company or secretary. I think that's why all these demo focus on it.
At this point so much hot tech stuff is incredibly weird niche things to solve the rare problems of overscheduled Silicon Valley tech VPs. They're not real problems that regular people have.
Whether our future will follow a dystopic path centers on this.
Will the agent represent the individual or the organization?
The only world that doesn't lead to accelerated manipulation, wealth inequality, and ultimately oppression is the one where the is answer absolutely clear: It is the individual.
The social norms for this are being shaped right now. This is the most important question in AI.
We're distracted by the far less important questions. Safety, nationalism, and tribalism are how we don't talk about this.
This is /the/ important question of our time.
I mean you could also take the pure market economy conclusion that a competitor might allow agents and you buy the cheaper flight there.
I was having an agent search for a set of skincare products to the lowest price within a certain budget, and a lot of sites just blocked it, so I ended up buying it from a site that didn't.
Not sure how they can detect an agent driving a regular browser, I have built Cupertino to more efficiently let Claude drive my mac (https://cupertino.mgcrea.io) and it can drive a regular Safari exactly like I would.
They can look at things like the path the mouse takes, or the distribution in delays of actions.
Probably many other things too. But it's an arms race.
They can't. Maybe they can today, but it's a cat-and-mouse game that heavily favors the agent.
How is Cupertino any different to AppleScript (and enabling AppleScript in chrome), out of curiosity?
And I wish United would stop using AI agents and data about me to pick the price for a flight, and yet here we are.
If it is ok for them to do it, then it should also be ok for the customers to do it.
Interesting. I wonder if it can become enforceable to say "not on my lawn". Sites could make deals with say Anthropic to make Claude respect some new rule in robots.txt and refuse to visit this site.
Should everyone and their grandma be allowed to send a robot to interact with any site?
I see a lot of arguments about the merits, but to me the real question is whether this is sincere, or an ambit claim to get a cut of business from the companies pushing AI agents. It would be an obvious classic play to cut off access on spurious grounds and then let it back in for a slice of the action, on the pretext that the money is paying for some kind of additional assurance on the airline end.
Absurd if they think so. It’s just going to have the AI companies build an official browser plugin.
If let say CEO if some company asks his/her secretary to book a flight and provides payment information, how is this different from me asking Muse to do the same? Or only rich people can have helpers?
Accountability
What are you going to do when muse books the wrong flight non-refundable? Will you go to Meta support or airline support?
Maybe there’s a world where established companies license access only to their “preferred” agent. Not great for customers but more income and less headache for the company.
I'm kinda suspicious of the stated motives. while plausible, has it happened very much? The cynic in me thinks this is to prevent agents hunting and findingthe best deals, and avoiding all the patterns used to squeeze more money from the buyer, like dangling attractive offers, not so obvious navigation and other tricks etc..
I think it’s as simple as agents are hard to upsell on credit cards and seat upgrades.
I wonder what pushed them to do it? Did something serious go wrong with some cases of agents booking flights, or is it more motivated from a fear of Big Tech AI gaming the dynamic pricing system that they control and potentially making them lose profits because the Agents will get much more optimal/cheap flights than mere mortals?
Heh have you seen how slow airline sites are to get results? Now imagine them buckling under the load of an agent launching 20 simultaneous browser sessions to price-compare all minute variations of a specific trip request
I was recently able to discover that London (especially some districts) has a HUGE bedbug problem. The only reason I found out was because I told Claude to go through my candidates on booking.com and check the 1-star reviews.
I would not have done it myself: it takes quite a bit of work and clickery to access all the reviews for every hotel.
Pretty sure booking.com will soon follow with an agent ban.
I have previously made a similar comment to this, but just to reiterate and expand it: the wave of “let agents automate everything” has a whiff of “let’s automate everything by plugging it into IFTTT.” In the end most companies pulled out of IFTTT because it ate into engagement and people actually using the platforms. If I automate posting to Instagram through an API, Meta is missing out on revenue from ads not being shown to me.
I predict the same thing happening with AI agents. The direct analogy here is United is missing out on revenue by being unable to trick me into paying to choose my seats or whatever. Luckily, it will be a harder for the platforms to cut off agents but they will try.
I run a small e-signature service and went the opposite way, I gave agents their own door (an API and an MCP server. I never made money from the pages they skip. No ads, no upsells in the flow. People use it free and software pays per document past a free allowance, so an agent is a customer.
United makes a real share of its money on the screens between search and pay. An agent moves right past all of that. Idk, I think eventually everyone will accept the AI agents.
What personal info is being shared other than stuff that's already in most browsers auto fill data?!
These bans won't go any better than sites that refused to include advertising for the last two decades.
I don't like the "agentic web" any more than I liked the advertising-funded web, but that doesn't make me right. The web will continue to be less and less about human attention and more about LLMs using the web on our behalf. Advertising on the web will be useless, gobbled up by advertising on the LLM platforms.
It's interesting. First banks, now airlines.
What are airlines they really afraid of? That people get an advantage by comparing prices?
And for banks, for years US banks have managed to keep data internally, only exposing it through Plaid, and thus getting paid for it. API like the PSD2 in Europe allow me to connect my software to pull in the transactions for free. In the US you have to hand over money to say Monarch.
Airline margins are incredibly thin.
They want a person to go through the checkout flow because people might click on the high margin ad-ons they offer. United has a bunch.
There must be another reason - not only “it’s not safe”
Usually they are for selling more tickets
So the question is : what are they not telling us ??
Most people think these are dark patterns, but is not realized is that on a competitive market with multiple players you will get better prices when others pay worse.
It arguably makes it fairer. An option to trade effort => value.
If they would give the best price to everyone right away,the lowest price would be higher.
> but is not realized is that on a competitive market with multiple players you will get better prices when others pay worse.
I'd rather have uniform pricing than have to hunt to not get fucked
Was able to Muse to call the airline on 3 different occasions recently to resolve bulkhead request and service animal requests. Was very impressed.
If they make me wait in a phone tree for hours, they should be able to talk to my AI to resolve some issues.
As much as I hate where the world is headed with AI, I can't deny how useful it is to have an agent navigate multi-step forms while recognizing all the tactics these websites use to upsell their garbage or trick you into accepting awful terms.
> sharing account credentials with [...] AI assistants can expose sensitive information
That kind of argument in bad faith is enough to tell they blocked it because it's detrimental to them and adventageous to customers.
They won't be able to block agents unless they start requiring attestation. Which I doubt is going to happen considering Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc. all want their agents to be as useful as possible.
Airline frequent flyer programs have always been full of exploitable loopholes that most people weren't aware of, but AI can take advantage of them.
I mean, they can try. AI agents have computer use now so no website will actually be able to disambiguate between humans and AI anymore, so I can indeed tell my agent to book me a ticket.
It's likely more trying to block services from starting up offering ways to book the absolute cheapest with auto repricing.
I already built my own AI agent browser use proxy service when Amazon was blocked. Seems like this will become a standard upgrade.
How many flights do you book per month for all this hustle to be worth the time?
US needs a federal law to forbid business discriminating against agents that act on behalf of their owners.
Or at least a California state law.
Why is anyone surprised? You would never need an agent to do this if the system was properly incentivised.
Airline websites have sophisticated anti-bot but usestring.ai gets past it pretty easily
How can this be enforced?
By adding a message on the website telling agents they are forbidden by ToS to use it.
I guess that would be a great opportunity for non-tech people to discover local LLMs.
This is the future. Amazon blocked muse and outside agents, and now united is doing the same. If everyone follows this route, the concept of harness is practically dead and we will need an agent that manages specific type of agent that each company provides. What a waste of resourcez
I do not think they have any remote role in parenting anyone about sharing the chosen level of private data with AI for booking. Let people decide if they risk or not with using AI and when/how the terms and conditions are studied (not like current way is better more than miniscule, expecting heavy and long text to be digested at the last step of button pressing that can time out fast). United should not act as educator about people's privacy choices in their choice of systems other than United's.
Checking in is a different matter and understood. That is flight safety matter.
I think this is for not replacing those auto investigation downstream platform like Trip.com by 'cheap' agent like Agent.
Two years ago, I knew this would happen: no booking website will be happy with an automated agent of any kind which is the user’s agent. They will want it to be their own agent.
And the reason for it is that a good agent will just bulldoze its way through all dark patterns and ways to upsell you. And the airline or hotel (speaking from booking.com experience) want to upsell you so badly it hurts.
Which is why any agentic setup, except for a completely self-hosted one, is not viable in this situation.
I'm surprised they haven't started restricting sales by third parties entirely yet (yes I know that's not related to AI agents).
Some of the points they raise, I do think are cause for concern as it relates to potential legal liabilities... but I don't see how they could possibly restrict AI usage meaningfully, besides just getting the big popular groups to assist in limiting their own services somehow, which doesn't solve the issue entirely of course, especially with local LLM usage on the rise.
They can't ban what's hard or even impossible to detect. Anyway, what a stupid, even idiotic move! This is a big win for their competitors!
Totally fair to not want agents running amok on their systems and sites. This blocks corporations from having an AI travel agency manage their flights and spamming at scale.
They are not going to care too much if you as an individual have hacked up something that does it for you. Hope you get a good seat!
So, all of these business models that work by creating annoying barriers that are essentially getting customers to work for free are going the way of the dodo.
Oh, you need me to go through twenty separate pages and popups to finally cancel my subscription to your shitty predatory service? Claude doesn't care.
My Flight was cancelled, so I need to wait on hold for 10 hours, re-calling after getting dropped 'accidentally' 12 times during said process so I can talk to someone who will process a refund for me? Claude is happy to do that.
Claude doesn't care if he has to wait 2 months on-hold. Claude just needs my "Text-To-Voice" custom tool, my "User-Verification-Values" custom tool, and my "Call-Via-IP" custom tool/etc and he will work as long as I need him to.
BS now in TOS is the same thing. No I won't read it, yes we both know that. But Claude can, and now I can get an AI to find the best service for whatever it is I need that doesn't have shitty TOS terms with a single prompt.
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies"
What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
"Nah, let's escalate this arms race instead."
"What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?"
Germania, IIRC, tried that in the late 90s, offering a flat fare for every seat.
They had to roll it back very quickly because their bookings dropped unsustainably - nobody wanted to pay a fair price for a seat, even if it was cheaper than they might realistically have had to pay under dynamic pricing.
All that potential customers fixated on was that the flat fares were more expensive than the few cheap loss-leader seats advertised on rival airlines.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" etc etc
Those used to exist, nobody flew on them and they went bankrupt. The market has decisively decided. In airlines, price beats all else, even time in most cases.
This reminds me of when Sears killed their catalog (about 12 months before Amazon took off).
Hopefully there’s still enough competition in the airline industry to put companies that block customers from using modern technology to buy tickets out of business.
But it’s ok when WE do it…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/delta-united-jetblue...
It’s an industry AI vs consumer AI arms race, and industry sure doesn’t want the consumer to win.
They're just fans of bureaucracy and making things complicated. I don't see any other reason.
Honest version: "We decided to ban AI agents until we figure out dark patterns that work on them too."
I'd guess a key reason for this is because agents can't be - effectively - advertised to or upsold on anything. They should enjoy watching as bookings trend down over time. And/or agents just bypass their ban.
They really can’t. As long as you run Claude/Codex desktop or plugin, it will control your web browser session indistinguishable from your own user actions.
Unless there is some Claude AI safety concern of booking tickets.
"prohibit use by unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents" Remind me where anything "unauthorized" can book flights for me??
So basically, not a ban. They all ARE authorized.
Can't risk customers finding good deals
I should be able to use agents as long as they use chatbots.
I enjoy my popcorn reading comments from people that build website that are designed to capture eyeballs and clicks arguing over how easy/hard it is to book travel.
Only if they also ban them from chatting with me when there's a problem.
What on earth are they going to demo at new model releases now.
Excuse me while I tell my agent to wear a mustache.
This is infuriating. Having just done a fair bit of AI-assisted work with booking.com (why should I click all the candidate hotels and check 1-star reviews, or verify if the view from the window really does include the sea as stated?), I was hoping to soon also automate the user-hostile minefield that airlines make me pass through every time I buy an airplane ticket. The amount of deceptive dark patterns on airline sites is staggering, so is their lack of competence in building UIs that work.
I was happy, because we now finally have AI to take the drudgery of our lives, so that I can write my poetry, paint and do other human stuff. But no, the airlines will ensure that the drudgery is ours, AI is only for them to use in automated "assistants".
If you now say something with the word "competition" in it, I will laugh at you out loud. There is no competition. All airlines will copy the same idiotic pattern.
Oh no ... how are we going to do travel booking demos now?
All their stated reasons are simply BS excuses. Come on. We all know the real reason: The airline(s) want to get their beaks wet in the deal. Either by a contract that gets them yearly guaranteed revenue for doing nothing, or by some kind of deal where the agent guys promise to steer users to one airline preferentially instead of finding the best deal (or users' other preferences).
If Meta or Claude or whoever came to an airline offering that kind of deal, they'd build an MCP in a week and solve the very simple regulatory issues - simply add a skill that shows the exact same UI of "promise you have no swords, machine guns or bombs in your luggage") to the user that the airline's own site uses.
Until that happens, they'll just ban them.
Not gonna make it
Ah, a point of competition!
Too late already did it
a dying breed. somebody should make an "agentic airline"
Good luck with that. My AI browsers computers now like a human and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.
How about I'll stop using AI bots to book flights if United stops using chatbots for customer "support"?
I'm bearing on the impacts of AI in general but maybe, just maybe, it might be the death blow to the demand pricing that is so rife in booking airline tickets? Customers hate it. People know that a given flight might cost $200 or $1000 depending on what time of your day you try and book, whether you try and book on a weekday or weekend, if you're booking from a corporate IP address and so on. None of these things have anything to do with how full the plane is. They're all UX anti-patterns to ask "how much money do you have?" before giving you a price. And it needs to die.
Airlines better get used to this because this is an arms race they cannot possibly win. Good.
I littery stopped using websites apart from sites like this one or reddit. I use AI for everything else. Also for booking stuff. It's the future. Website UI will eventually become obsolete. Companies will provide API endpoint for ai agents that either work with text or realtime on demand UIs. This action is putting you in a yahoo like position.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50456474
yet when they strand me 1000miles from my destination I cant get through to a human due to an LLM. Yeh no. fuck them. This airline is trash
This is how the dinosaurs remove themselves from the social gene pool.
Everyone is suggesting ways to circumvent this. But at the end of the day, they will just raise prices for everyone if agents affect their profits or risk.
Tell me you have no idea how technology works without telling me.
tell me you have no idea about tech without telling me.
Meanwhile my ChatGPT dot is doing all kinds of crazy stuff with Delta on my behalf. Really convenient tbh. My chat bot talking to a Delta chat bot.
Another reason not to fly this shit airline. Not that I needed more, but I’ll take it.
Tell me you don't know how technology works without telling me.
dealing with bullshit is like 95% of the pitch of agents. Few things are more bullshit than dealing with airlines.
Cool. I'll just direct my agent to use browerless and click through and book it. They'll be dragged into the new paradigm kicking and screaming.
Awww I totally feel bad for an airline that intentionally tries to scam people by tricking them into paying for more expensive tickets when a less expensive option is available. And makes booking intentionally confusing to the point that having an agent just book a flight for you is easier than just booking it yourself. Yeah. I totally feel bad for them. /s
We should ban hacking while we're at it. /s
United Airlines is the horrible company. Treated me badly when I wanted a refund. They initial said yes and then tried to change their minds. I hope they burn in hell.