Wall or door

Soon Spond’s user base will not be people alone; the people come with their agents.

Every service sitting on users’ data must soon choose a strategy: build a wall, or make a door.

In recent weeks we have seen both.

The wall: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi and Schwab said within four days in October that external AI agents may not move money from customers’ accounts. Yelp only lets in agents that pay for data. Delta blocks agents that book tickets. Amazon shuts out, among others, Meta’s agent Muse.

The door: Shopify opened up last week to all agents, with access to more than a billion products. The buyer sets the budget and approves each purchase. Meta, Walmart and Stripe have launched an open standard for how personal agents should identify themselves to businesses. Cloudflare lets websites charge agents per request.

I think the door wins. For three reasons.

First, there is a customer behind the agent. Meta says it outright: rejecting the agent is rejecting the customer.

Second, the pressure will be enormous. In June, automated traffic overtook human traffic in Cloudflare’s measurements. It has to be handled anyway. The question is whether it comes through a door you have built, or through the window.

Third, a wall only keeps out the honest agents. The others get in anyway, disguised as humans. Then you no longer know who you are talking to.

Even Amazon’s lawsuit points the same way. After Amazon lost its appeal against Perplexity in August, it now emphasises that the agent concealed that it was an agent.

So the real choice is a door with a lock. The agent shows who it is, whom it acts for and what it is allowed to do. The human approves what has consequences. The banks draw the line at actions, not at the agent.

Europe has been here before. With PSD2, banks had to move from screen scraping to controlled interfaces for third parties. The wall ended up as a door with a lock. I think it will happen again, only faster, and this time for every service with user data.

The question is not whether the agents get in, but on whose terms. Those who build the door set the terms.

Which strategy is your service choosing? I hope for the door; I notice I increasingly use agents to ease small frictions in everyday life.