The Agent Can Do Everything, Except Get Through the Door

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They promised us the AI agent that does everything: shops, books, pays, schedules. The future arrived, rang the bell, and found every door locked.

Amazon. Amazon sued Perplexity to keep its Comet shopping agent off the site and won a preliminary injunction. On August 4, 2026, the Ninth Circuit vacated it, finding it was users, with the agent’s help, who accessed Amazon, and in September the court denied rehearing. Legally, the door is open. In my own experience, Amazon still doesn’t want our bots in.

Google. Google’s own Chrome Auto Browse agent will take you to the checkout page and stop, making you press the button yourself. Meanwhile, October 2026 testing found Google’s BotGuard refusing browsers that declare they’re automated. The Verge reported agents being turned away all over: Yelp only allows agents that pay for its data program, Delta blocks them from booking, and users report Google flagging accounts for “suspicious activity.”

The banks. On October 22, 2026, Reuters reported that major U.S. banks had been blocking third-party AI agents from operating inside customer accounts, following an Axios report that some agents took actions users never asked for. Morgan Stanley blocked third-party agents from its platforms. That followed a stretch in mid-October in which JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Charles Schwab all said agents can’t move customer money. Jamie Dimon: “We’re not going to allow just any outside agent to come in inside the company.” PNC’s William Demchak called it “incredibly unsafe” and “not going to happen.” Your AI can see your balance. It can’t touch it.

Washington. DHS ordered all federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products, and anything built on DeepSeek, and barred future purchases. The order, signed July 24, 2026, was made public October 19–20, 2026. The Defense Department is excluded.

Your phone. On October 22, 2026, Grok Bot announced it can use Calendar, Reminders, Contacts and more on iOS and Android, and Elon Musk shared it. My prediction, and only a prediction: Apple and Samsung won’t let an outside agent run through their phones unchallenged for long.

Simple resume by Twin Rivers Communications

The high-end ponder. We built a mind that can do almost anything and a world that lets it do almost nothing. Every company wants an agent; nobody wants yours. Each fortress welcomes its own robot and turns away everyone else’s. That’s not an intelligence revolution; it’s feudalism with better autocomplete. Some locks exist for good reasons. But what is a key worth if every door changes its locks the moment it’s cut? The promise was a servant that could go anywhere. What we got is a genius under house arrest.

The real obstacle. It isn’t the locks. It’s us, humans fighting humans. In March 2026, during the Iran war, drones hit Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and damaged another in Bahrain; by September, AWS said some of those sites couldn’t be restored. In October 2026, Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in Sasovo, Kaluga and Vladimir, a Sberbank data center in Balakovo, and a VK server site near St. Petersburg. Russia, meanwhile, has struck data centers in Kyiv, Dnipro and Odesa, cutting internet to about 100,000 households around the capital. We built minds that live in buildings, then started blowing up the buildings.

How this all unfolds amid our glorious human mess is questionable at best. So with all that promise, if it isn’t allowed to do anything… what the hell do you use it for?

— C. Rich

Sources:

My Living AI News Now. Your Place for AI News. Commentary and opinion; predictions are labeled as such.

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