为 AI Agent 优化互联网，可能会让普通人类的体验更糟糕

但随着个人 AI Agent 的推出，这一局面正在被彻底颠覆。这些 Agent 能够在网络上为你代劳各类事务，例如预订机票或酒店房间。随着 OpenAI 的 Dots 和 Meta 的 Muse 等应用的推出，它们近期迎来了规模化爆发。Muse 在上线首月就获得了 500 万次下载，而 Agent 驱动的网络流量在 8 月至 9 月间增长了两倍。

在一个很大程度上优先考虑人类而设计的互联网上，这些 Agent 与人类访客的混杂交织进展得并不顺利，许多网站都在封禁消费者派来议价或规划假期的 AI Agent。尽管如此，如果对 Agent 的需求持续攀升，互联网将越来越倾向于为它们而非我们进行重新设计。

这种变化之所以会到来，是因为 Agent 确实代表了网络访客的“第三种形态”。它们当然不是人类，并且是以机器的速度在使用互联网。但它们也并不完全等同于传统的机器人（bot），因为它们代表个体人类去执行完全合法且有用的任务，只是工作速度远快于真人。

由于 Agent 无法套入我们现有的用于区分机器人与人类的系统，一些平台（尤其是安全意识更强的平台）索性选择将其全盘封禁。《TechCrunch》近期报道称，人们在将自己的 Agent 部署到从必胜客（Pizza Hut）到 Yelp（该网站不允许 AI 预订餐厅）等各类网站时遇到了阻碍。亚马逊已封禁了 Muse 的 Agent，并正在与 AI 初创公司 Perplexity 打官司以封禁其 Agent。尽管法官最近做出了有利于 Perplexity 的裁决，但亚马逊已经提起上诉，并在诉状中辩称 AI Agent 威胁到了其广告业务，因为这让人类看到的广告与投放给机器人的广告变得更难区分。

这些封禁对早期尝鲜者来说固然令人恼火，但宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院副教授伊森·莫里克（Ethan Mollick）预测，这种情况很快将波及整个网络。例如，一旦利用 AI Agent 申请退款或讨价还价成为常识，Agent 就会彻底挤爆客服部门，以至于真人完全无法使用。“当人类的 Agent 不被允许代表他们做这些事时，人类最终会变得非常恼火，”他最近在 LinkedIn 上写道。

如果对个人 Agent 的需求持续增长，各大平台终将找到接纳它们的方法。这一点尤其确凿，因为绝大多数由 Agent 驱动的网络流量都流向了电商网站，这意味着如果平台允许大批新型 AI Agent 代表真人进行购物，平台将有利可图。事实上，电商巨头 Shopify 已经开始拥抱这些 Agent，为它们开辟了绕过专为人类设计页面的专属结账通道。

亟待思考的问题是：在此过程中，我们其他普通人所面对的互联网将会变成什么样？我们已经习惯了一个即使越来越旨在剥削我们注意力的网络，但至少人类依然是其预设的目标用户。然而，那个互联网可能会让位于一个为最终在数量上超过我们的 Agent 优化的网络，从而让留下的真人体验变得更加痛苦。

局面会如何演变？也许网站作为真人目的地的地位会日益被忽视。想要亲自浏览和对比产品的真人会遭遇更糟糕的界面。验证系统并非完美无缺；想象一下你被频繁要求验证自己是人类而非 Agent（嘿，也许你还得扫描虹膜才能完成验证）。你想买的那件毛衣不再对所有人标示统一价格，而是向不同人的 Agent 展示不同的价格。而你永远无法确定，你的 Agent 给出的推荐是否受到了广告或平台佣金的影响。

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 visitors—on an internet designed largely to prioritize people—has gone poorly, with many websites blocking AI agents that consumers have sent to negotiate prices or plan vacations. Still, if the demand for agents keeps going up, the internet will be increasingly redesigned for them instead of us.

Such changes are coming because agents really do mark a third category of web visitor. They’re not humans, of course, and they use the internet at machine speed. But they’re not quite bots, either, because they’re acting on behalf of individual people to do tasks that can be perfectly legitimate and useful. They just work faster than a person would.

Since agents don’t fit into the systems we have for differentiating bots from people, some platforms (especially the more security-conscious ones) have opted to just ban them entirely. TechCrunch recently reported people having trouble deploying their agents to websites ranging from Pizza Hut to Yelp, which doesn’t allow AI to book restaurant reservations. Amazon has blocked Muse’s agents and is waging a court battle against the AI startup Perplexity to block its agents too. Though a judge recently ruled in favor of Perplexity, Amazon has filed an appeal in which it argues that AI agents threaten its advertising business by making it harder to distinguish between ads seen by humans and those served to bots.

These blocks are annoying for early adopters, but Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, predicts it will soon affect the whole web. Once it becomes common knowledge that AI agents can be sent to request refunds or negotiate prices, for example, agents will overwhelm customer service departments to the point where they become unusable by real people. “Humans will eventually get very annoyed when their agents aren’t allowed to do this on their behalf,” he recently wrote on LinkedIn.

If demand for personal agents grows, platforms will find ways to let them in. That’s especially true because the vast majority of agentic web traffic is to e-commerce sites, meaning that platforms have money to be made if they allow the legions of new AI agents to shop on behalf of real people. Indeed, the e-commerce giant Shopify is already welcoming the agents by giving them their own checkout lanes that bypass pages designed for humans.

The pressing question is what will happen to the internet for the rest of us in the process. We’ve grown used to a web where, even as it’s increasingly designed to exploit our attention, humans have at least remained the intended users. But that internet might yield to one optimized instead for the agents that will eventually outnumber us, making it even more miserable for the humans who are left.

How might this go? Perhaps websites become increasingly neglected as destinations for real people. Humans who want to browse and compare products themselves encounter worse interfaces. Verification systems are imperfect; imagine constantly being asked to verify that you’re a human, not an agent (and hey, maybe you’ll need to get your iris scanned to do so). That sweater you want doesn’t have one price listed for everyone but instead displays different prices to different people’s agents. You can never tell when your agent’s recommendation is influenced by advertisements or platform commissions.