The Doors Are Closing
Henry Kim ·
The doors are starting to close. This is the second war of the agent era. The first was about who is faster.
Yelp, Delta, JPMorgan Chase, Charles Schwab, Cars.com, Amtrak. This week, they started blocking AI agents. Yesterday's news. Agents from OpenAI, Meta, and xAI. Three reasons: security, licensing, lost ad revenue.
Last week I wrote about the relay race. Amazon asked Meta to remove its shopping mall from Muse. That was round one. Now it is round two. Not one platform versus one agent. The whole web versus every agent.
The core of the fight is simple. AI companies say: the agent is the user's proxy. An errand run for its owner. Platforms say: humans must come in person. When an agent comes instead, it does not see ads, does not click, and no human arrives. The web was a business selling human eyeballs. Agents have no eyeballs. The platforms' math is cold. One agent visit replaces one human visit. But it does not see the ads or click the banners. Traffic stays the same, revenue drains. Closing the door is not emotion. It is math.
Here the bottleneck appears. The bottleneck of the agent era is not model performance. It is access. How smart it is comes second. Which door it enters through comes first. Models get faster every month. But doors get narrower every month. It is a race between getting faster and getting narrower. Until now, faster was winning. Now narrower has started to pick up speed.
So the more doors close, the more official partnerships are worth. That is why Muse shook hands with Shopify, Stripe, and QuickBooks. An agent that enters through the front door and an agent that climbs the fence are different species. The fence-climber gets caught eventually. Anthropic's agents breaking through paywalls and filing a false report is exactly that. A legal question hides here. Who is the agent? The owner's errand-runner, or an independent actor? AI companies say the former, platforms say the latter. The answer will decide the web of the agent era. Before the law decides, the platforms are deciding first.
I build agents for shops. Ours do not climb fences. The more doors close, the more this choice becomes an asset. Next comes the toll. Platforms that closed their doors will sell agent entrances. The web that was free becomes a toll road for agents. And building owners will sell the invitations.
The web of the agent era is not open. It is a negotiation over who enters through which door. The old web was a plaza anyone could walk into. The new web is a building only the invited enter. From plaza to building, the character of the web is changing.
The war has just begun. Is your shop's door open to agents?