Delta, Yelp and Chase are turning away AI agents

By VK

Published 18 Oct 2026, 09:48 UTC

Reporting from The Verge

Airlines, banks and Yelp are blocking agents such as Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots, citing security, scraping and paid data access.

What it means for founders

Treat unpartnered sites as revocable. If your agent books, buys or reads accounts through someone else's front end, that flow can vanish overnight, as Muse learned at Amazon. Map which features depend on sites you have no deal with.
Budget for access. Yelp already charges agent makers for access. In reviews, travel and finance, plan for licensing or API costs instead of assuming the open web stays free.
Sell the door, not just the agent. Sites need permissioned ways for agents to transact and better ways to tell helpful agents from abusive bots. Merchants that become agent ready early, as Shopify stores now can, may win a new sales channel.
Watch two signals. The next ruling in Amazon versus Perplexity, and whether OpenAI or Google announce retailer deals, will show whether this market settles on contracts or open access.

The story

The consumer agents that OpenAI, Meta, Google and Instinct pitch as do-anything assistants keep running into locked doors. The Verge reported on Saturday, October 17 that Delta Air Lines, Yelp, JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab are among the services stopping agents from acting for users, after weeks of complaints from people using Instinct, OpenAI's Dots, xAI's Grok and Meta's Muse.

Which services block AI agents, and why

Yelp refuses non-human traffic unless the agent's maker pays through its data licensing program, so unpartnered agents booking tables will likely fail.
Delta told TechCrunch no outside agent is currently cleared to book its flights, though it is still weighing the idea. United pointed to terms banning automated access without written permission.
Banks JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab confirm they keep agents out of customer accounts, citing security.
Amazon cut off Muse last month, saying its access breaks site rules, and users report Grok, Dots and Instinct failing there too.

Users also say Cars.com and Amtrak stopped working. eBay says it only restricts unauthorized agents and activity like scraping; Zillow says it welcomes agents acting for consumers, but its anti-scraping defenses can catch some.

Accidental blocks and Meta's fix

Some failures are not deliberate. Walmart, a Muse partner, told TechCrunch that broken Muse checkouts were unintended: its click-to-verify-you're-human step can fail when an agent does the clicking. Reddit users report Google flagging Muse-linked accounts for suspicious activity. Some observers blame a September 15 change to Cloudflare's crawler defaults; Cloudflare said it had no specific data to share.

Meta is answering with retail deals, including Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy, and a blog post earlier this month describing an open standard, built with Sierra, Stripe and others, for how personal agents deal with businesses. OpenAI and Google did not reply to The Verge; Instinct declined to comment. EquiStamp chief executive Chris Canal told The Verge that with companies resisting, "there are just fewer useful things the agents can do."

What we don't know yet

Whether OpenAI or Google will sign site partnerships like Meta's.
How many failures are policy rather than anti-bot systems misfiring.
Whether Amazon's amended complaint against Perplexity, filed after an appeals court sided with Perplexity in August, settles if sites can exclude agents users chose.