[miki123211]

1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of.

2. Again, no way to identify users (bots use hordes of residential proxies with only a few requests per IP).

3. Agents and bots care more about a universal solution that works for all the sites than an efficient solution. You could standardize on a header for this, but then some sites would start hiding some content in the API for "business reasons", making this header untrustworthy. Unless you're a site so large that it deserves special handling, it ain't gonna work.

[logicallee]

>1. Bots don't make purchases (and you can't identify them anyway), so there's nothing to take the costs off of.

yes they do. Claude Code with Opus 4.6 bought a U.S. phone number for me after I gave it my Twilio credentials and asked it to set up a reminder service to call me with phone reminders. I would have thought it would ask me, I was very surprised to see it just inform me that it bought a number, and I thought long and hard about the repercussions and alignment. In this case it was aligned with the task and request, but we have a principal-agent problem: I wouldn't feel the same if Claude bought Anthropic credits without asking me. ("Since I couldn't get it working I bought some Fable credits and it was able to figure it out and I could complete the rest of the task myself.")

[ericd]

Regarding 1, a significant portion of what I’d like my agents doing for me is helping me make purchasing decisions. It’s a lot of what I’m sending them out to research. So anything that’s making that harder is disadvantaging itself in those purchasing decisions.

[apothegm]

Wouldn’t (1) be the point?