The internet was designed for humans. That was the 60s and 70s. Now, humans aren’t the only ones online anymore.
AI agents, bots, and automated systems are now capable of browsing websites, reading content, and gathering data, they have to go fast and until recently have been mostly using APIs to get this done.
Yet, most large websites block them. From anti-bot defenses to CAPTCHAs, the internet is increasingly hostile to non-human agents.
And the reason? Mostly unjustified.
Why are humans allowed, but AI agents aren't?
There’s a tiny but important difference between scraping and getting work done.
Scraping is associate with mindless extraction. Like a vacuum cleaner sucking-in any data without context, permission, or contributing value back.
On the other hand AI agents aren’t here to scrape for the sake of it - I have seen it first hand. They are here to get work done, mostly researching, summarizing, assisting, building new products. You could argue this data is then use to train further a model, you would probably argue correctly, but that’s a topic for another day.
When machines operate with purpose, accountability, and respect for the ecosystem, they stop being a threat and start being collaborators. How can this “respect” be hard-coded into a system?
Would the concept of “paying” for access be insane?
The logic is simple:
For website owners, bots feel like freeloaders → they cosume all your bandwidth and content you worked hard to generate.
But this creates friction: