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.

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??

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.

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.

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 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 "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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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 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?

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?

Would you have a problem if instead of stopping you, they charged you more because you're booking with an agent?

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

Yes, but how much do you value that money, and how much do you value our product?

:^)

"if you were me, then I'd be you, and use your body to get to the top." - ace venture

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?

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.

>(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.

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