Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Our Computer Using agent just solved CAPTCHA up to Level 6
17 points by PrateekJ17 110 days ago
We did not teach the CUA to solve "I'm not a robot" challenges. Yes, the irony is not lost on us.

Coasty just hit 82% on the OSWorld benchmark, that's SOTA for computer-use agents operating in real desktop environments.

CAPTCHAs, browser popups, cookie banners, all the things that break every other agent? Ours just… handles them. Replay link, if you're interested https://coasty.ai/share/1cd404ae-3fcb-4d7f-b9d4-dac7aa26fc6d

2 comments

If it rids the world of captchas, I’m all for it!
I agree, please do sign up and give us feedback would love to talk!
And is this a good development, do you think?
It depends on which side of the equation you're on.

For traditional web security, it's a real problem. CAPTCHAs were the last reliable way to distinguish humans from bots, and if agents can solve them consistently, the entire model breaks. Rate limiting and behavioral analysis become the only viable alternatives, and both have significant limitations.

But there's a more interesting angle: agents solving CAPTCHAs reveals that the underlying question — "are you human?" — is becoming the wrong question for a growing number of use cases. We're entering a world where AI agents are legitimate users of the web. They book flights, manage calendars, interact with APIs. For those use cases, verifying that a client is a capable AI agent is actually more useful than verifying it's human.

So I'd say it's neither purely good nor bad — it's a signal that we need different verification primitives. "Are you human?" was a useful proxy for "are you authorized and acting in good faith," but it was always just a proxy. Now that proxy is breaking, we'll need to be more explicit about what we're actually trying to verify.

It is definitely much better than where we were few years ago, helps us keep systems in check