Named sites are blocking agent tasks

Emma Roth’s Verge report is timestamped 2026-10-17T13:00:00Z, 21:00 in Beijing on 17 October. She writes that in recent weeks, users of Meta’s Muse, xAI’s Grok, OpenAI’s Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks that stop their agents from finishing tasks on major sites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data-licensing program. Delta Air Lines is preventing agents from booking tickets for users. JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab have also confirmed that they are blocking AI agents from accounts because of security. Some users say Cars.com and Amtrak, which previously worked, no longer do. Yelp, Delta, JPMorgan, and Schwab are company statements or confirmations in the report. Cars.com and Amtrak are user accounts.

Amazon was already blocking shopping agents last year: it banned Perplexity’s agentic shopping feature and sued. Amazon said at the time that it had repeatedly asked Perplexity to stop letting agents shop on its site, and that third parties buying for customers should operate openly and respect whether a service wants to participate. A judge later ordered Perplexity to stop its agents from shopping there. An appeals court overturned that ruling in August. Amazon has since filed an amended complaint. That is the lawsuit timeline in the report, not a new ruling this week. The older case did not stop later products. Muse recently ran into Amazon. Amazon said Muse’s continued access violates its site policies. There are also reports that xAI’s Grok, Instinct’s agent, and OpenAI’s Dots cannot use Amazon. The Verge asked OpenAI and Google about the blocks and did not immediately hear back. Instinct declined to comment.

Chris Canal, chief executive of the safety evaluator EquiStamp, told The Verge that if companies are actively working to stop the claim that agents can do anything a person can do online, there are fewer useful things the agents can do. That is his judgment, not a usage statistic. In a post earlier this month, Meta answered sites that block Muse: turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it. The company says it would rather work with businesses on the underlying concerns than see them lose that customer. Instead of fighting Amazon, Meta has partnered with retailers including Walmart, Gap, Sephora, and Best Buy so Muse can shop on their sites. Shopify has also opened its storefront network to AI agents.

Posts on Reddit say Google is blocking some accounts that use Muse for suspicious activity, and that some people still have trouble checking out at Walmart despite the partnership. Those are user reports, not company confirmations. The article also notes that in 2025 Cloudflare offered a one-click block for AI crawlers and began blocking crawlers that scrape for both search indexing and training. That is older context in the article, not this week’s named blocks on tickets and accounts. The article does not describe how to get around the blocks. This draft does not either.