[chatmasta]

I suspect this kind of framework will be adopted by websites with income streams that are not dependent on human attention (i.e. advertising revenue, mostly). They have no reason to resist LLM browser agents. But if they’re in the business of selling ads to human eyeballs, expect resistance.

Maybe the AI companies will find a way to resell the user’s attention to the website, e.g. “you let us browse your site with an LLM, and we’ll show your ad to the user.”

[onesociety2022]

Even the websites whose primary source of revenue is not ad impressions might be resistant to let the agents be the primary interface through which users interact with their service.

Instacart currently seems to be very happy to let ChatGPT Operator use its website to place an order (https://www.instacart.com/company/updates/ordering-groceries...) [1]. But what happens when the primary interface for shopping with Instacart is no longer their website or their mobile app? OpenAI could demand a huge take rate for orders placed via ChatGPT agents, and if they don't agree to it, ChatGPT can strike a deal with a rival company and push traffic to that service instead. I think Amazon is never going to agree to let other agents use its website for shopping for the same reason (they will restrict it to just Alexa).

[1] - the funny part is the Instacart CEO quit shortly after this and joined OpenAI as CEO of Applications :)

[miguelspizza]

The side-panel browser agent is a good middle ground to this issue. The user is still there looking at the website via their own browser session, the AI just has access to the specific functionality which the website wants to expose to it. The human can take over or stop the AI if things are going south.

[miguelspizza]

The Primary client for WebMCP enabled websites is a chrome extension like Claude Chrome. So the human is still there in the loop looking at the screen. MCP also supports things like elicitation so the website could stop the model and request human input/attention