> 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.