Making the internet better for AI agents might make it worse for everyone else

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Until recently, you could divide internet users into just two categories: bots and people. Websites have long allowed bots to perform automated tasks, like capturing the content of web pages, but rules govern what they can access and how they behave. The web, after all, is designed primarily for people, even if we occasionally have to solve puzzles and captchas to prove we are not bots.

But this is being entirely upended by the release of personal AI agents, which can do things for you online, like booking flights or hotel rooms. They have recently been unleashed at scale by the launch of apps like OpenAI’s Dots and Meta’s Muse. Muse was downloaded 5 million times in its first month, and agentic web traffic tripled from August to September.

The mingling of these agents with human …