> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies"
What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
Those used to exist, nobody flew on them and they went bankrupt. The market has decisively decided. In airlines, price beats all else, even time in most cases.
Alaska nickles and dimes just like the rest, charges for the privilege of picking your seat, etc. They're not worse than the rest, but I don't see them as any better, certainly. I almost exclusively fly Alaska since my closest airport is one of their major hubs.
"What if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?"
Germania tried that in the late 90s, offering a flat fare for every seat.
They had to roll it back within a few weeks because their bookings dropped dramatically - nobody wanted to pay a fair price for a seat, even if it was cheaper than they might have had to pay under dynamic pricing. All they fixated on was that the flat fares were more than the few cheap seats on rival airlines.
The market can remain irrational linger than you can remain solvent etc etc
> "United is saying they don't want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies," he told CBS News. "Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches."
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
Flight reservation systems are some of the most complicated on the planet. They are specifically designed to maximize profit while meeting constraints imposed by airports (such as monthly minimums for seats sold per month to keep their gates). Prices change every few minutes and depend on the utilized capacity of all segments that a route touches. There's a reason most discount sites use the backend operated by Google instead of writing their own.
Companies like United offer different prices to different web browsers. Presumably agents realize this, and can be instructed to probe the same seat a few hundred times with different profiles and different locations, then buy the cheapest ticket.
That seems like a completely reasonable response. The vendors are acting like a cartel. The behavior is illegal (they do not honor lowest advertised prices), and the courts are too bought off to step in.
I'm surprised they haven't started restricting sales by third parties entirely yet (yes I know that's not related to AI agents).
Some of the points they raise, I do think are cause for concern as it relates to potential legal liabilities... but I don't see how they could possibly restrict AI usage meaningfully, besides just getting the big popular groups to assist in limiting their own services somehow, which doesn't solve the issue entirely of course, especially with local LLM usage on the rise.
I wonder what pushed them to do it? Did something serious go wrong with some cases of agents booking flights, or is it more motivated from a fear of Big Tech AI gaming the dynamic pricing system that they control and potentially making them lose profits because the Agents will get much more optimal/cheap flights than mere mortals?
I mean, they can try. AI agents have computer use now so no website will actually be able to disambiguate between humans and AI anymore, so I can indeed tell my agent to book me a ticket.
The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge.
It's mostly a commodity, specially for economy class where price matters. After gas and grocery, its the most vicious, cut throat business where a customer will switch from United to Delta over $5.
It sounds counterproductive but personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector. They are just betting that the "worth it" will "make it up" in the long run vs. a customer who's just there for the $50 seat.
What happens if you say "screw it, I'll code my own custom MCP connector to United.com!"
Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
Also: flight alerts and price tracking are a thing too.
I don’t know anyone that’s seen a cheap flight for sale and decided to wait for the price to go up.
There are less price sensitive customers, but even the most price sensitive people don’t ask United if they could please charge them a bit more than the listed price.
If the 50$ flights are gone from the site, won't another site sell those instead?
Later on, assuming all of the carriers are affected by this, flights will get more expensive and maybe we will invest in other modes of transport that is cheaper
I do not understand the airline's side of that argument, sorry. It seems like what you are describing is:
1. The airline is willing to sell a few tickets for $50 instead of $250, but only to the folks who it deems "worth it" and advertises accordingly.
2. Those $50 tickets are below cost, so each $50 ticket sold means everyone else will have to pay a little more.
3. If enough "general population" people find and buy those $50 tickets instead, the airline will discontinue the practice.
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
Suppose you want to get people to a party, and offer $50 early bird tickets, and want eg a gender balance. But they just get scalped and resold for $300. Why should you care, you authoritarians? Scalpers have just as much right as anyone to purchase tickets…
Actually if I ran an airline I’d try to prevent everyone from being able to snipe the best seats with their agents as soon as they came out. Using lotteries, special manual two factor authentication etc.
People already were going to great lengths to find airline ticket deals. If there was ever an edge in buying tickets as soon as they were available, that would already be heavily exploited by now. By the way, I'm fairly certain it's the opposite. Airline tickets are not typically a good deal when they are first made available.
> If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
The effort you (and others) are willing to go to get the $50 doesn't seem to match up with the "fine, the practice should go". If it doesn't matter, why expend effort to do it?
Because while the $50 deal exists then everyone has the right to fight for it (I would even argue that it's rational!). I don’t see how that’s incompatible with wishing the $50 deal didn’t exist in the first place. Pricing that rewards whoever spends the most time searching is a bad system, and agents are a fair fix because they make that local price optima findable for everyone.
I think pricing that rewards searching is actually very fair and good. You give customers choice between money and effort - rich people will book the first flight and pay more, subsidized poorer people.
If agents make finding cheaper tickets trivial and the default, customers lose that choice.
Airlines have a large fixed cost and a small marginal cost for each passenger on a plane. If they charge $250 for each seat and half the seats are empty then they are wasting capacity and have to charge enough for each seat such that half the seats pay for an entire flight. If they can fill the second half of the plane with $50 passengers then they are providing more service (a social good!) and can perhaps reduce the expensive tickets to $200.
Of course everyone wants the $50 tickets, so the market gets all weird trying to both fill flights and charge as much as possible, while being competitive with other airlines that are trying to do the same thing. Because there are competing airlines, the final margins stay low, so the airlines are barely "maximizing" profits so much as they are simply maintaining profitability.
I have no problem with dynamic pricing. Many companies in different industries do that, even if they do not have the large fixed / small marginal cost model. That is just business.
But once the company starts defining "worthy of cheap tickets" groups the system becomes very murky; and murky systems impose costs on everyone.
So why don't they just offer prices (EDIT: starting prices) at $150 instead. Then the plane won't be half full but perhaps 90%. The price for those last 10% of seats can go up or down 1. depending on the demand for that flight and 2. how much time is left.
Because they want it both ways, sell the tickets they were going to sell anyays/regardless of price, and then again the two super underpriced tickets to people who wouldn't have paid if it weren't $50; tada, you've made an extra $100.
> For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Your premise is false, as it rests on the logic that there is a zero sum game between passengers. Airlines offer tickets at the level and price they feel like they can sell them in the marketplace. There's not some invisible total allocated to passengers on each flight, where if one person "gets a deal" others pay for it.
I am copying my comment below here because there is a fundamental misunderstanding of consumer surplus here:
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
So… please excuse my ignorance if I’m being ignorant…
But isn’t this the same argument, more or less, that police make for not wanting to have body cameras on all the time, because they would then be “forced” to give everyone who was breaking the law a ticket or to arrest them instead of letting them go if it “feels like they should”?
The analogy being that the police could pick and choose who they should arrest versus who they should not and let off with a warning - who is “worth it” (i.e. generally, people of, umm, not color, it turns out).
Anyways… it does seem that some kinda of preferential treatment could be lost here. But preferential good treatment for some is kind preferential bad treatment for others, so theres that.
> The airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone without giving specific people (atleast those who they don't deem "worthy") an edge. Here's a great, short comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50459444
Your sentence and the comment you linked say completely different things. You say airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone, the comment says they're trying to achieve perfect price discrimination to maximize revenue. Those are not the same thing.
So here's a version that doesn't glaze airlines: it's an extension of dynamic pricing, everyone knows that prices (generally) rise as the date of the flight approaches so that airlines can get more money out of business travelers and single moms going to funerals who have inelastic demand, while vacationers with their elastic demand aren't priced out. But then how do you maximize money from vacationers? Well, some are going to have more flexibility with dates than others and you want to get the most money out of them no matter what, so you don't show how your prices change day to day (both day of flight and day of booking). Then, people with more to spend will just book whenever and the aforementioned single mother will waste hours checking various combinations daily to find a price she can afford. That's the customer that United deems "worth it", they won't book for any price higher than $50 so they add a ton of friction to force that customer to put effort into finding that price. But if anyone can overcome that friction with an AI agent, airlines lose out on that dynamic pricing signal.
Ah I had two motivations, it started when ralphs and amazon were blocking my agent, it's then pretty easy to ask the agent to solve their own problem if you give it compute resources.
I also wanted to play with some ideas I have around approval of agentic actions and sharing of credentials. I can selectively share browser cookies with my MCP server and it'll inject them into browsers the agent can use for a limited scoped task. I use a decision API to try and see if the browser actions match the approved work or if they're going awry. This is generally preferable (for me) vs just handling my credentials over and letting the agents YOLO with their cloud browser. I get saved recordings sent to my phone.
Somebody once said, that airline booking pages itself are one of the most sophisticated CAPTCHAs. No idea if this is true, but they obviously don't want their customers to easily find the best deals.
I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
For finding the cheapest deals agents can still be used. Just the booking itself is probably better done manually. It also eliminates the risk that the agent does something stupid.
edit: they might try to block agents, but this won't be possible with browser use. they can always throttle users by IP or fingerprint. Letting an agent book a flight might be risky, because they might cancel a booking or impose a fee if they somehow detect it.
Maybe I have Stockholm syndrome, but what about the booking pages is super complicated?
I often use Kayak or google flights to screen multiple airlines, but once I've found a flight I like, I generally book it on the airline's site, and the UI is basically identical to Kayak. Put in some dates, some locations, click search, browse through the options, pick the one you want. If you are flexible on dates, there is a little +/- 3 days checkbox that will show a table of flight prices.
I'm probably stupid, but what are the improvements that would help customers find the best deals?
Hotel sites are dramatically worse IMO. Airlines have mostly made things mostly understandable.
Now, if you're buying from consolidators on their consistently-shady-looking sites, which will contact you later with your ticket if they got it at all: oh yeah those are sometimes total insanity.
I'm not familiar with shady sites, but probably >75% of my previous 50 trips were booked through Kayak or similar sites. They make it painless to group everything you need for where you are going, and if there is any problem, like a flight delay, etc., since it was booked all together, they just adjust the future bookings/book other flights as necessary to make sure your trip is smooth riding. Any time I need more than just one resource (car, hotel, flight), I use a consolidator because if they aren't bundled, no one lifts a finger to help you when anything out of your control happens, but they bend over backwards to help if you used a booking site.
The last consolidator I used (I forget the name, but it was nearly "obviously a shell Amazon company"-level strange) saved me nearly $1000 on three flights and two hotels, but it routed me through seven completely different domains to do it, sometimes with the bulk of the page in an embedded iframe for yet another site. Once it was two layers of iframes deep. I checked because by this point I was flabbergasted by the whole process.
Many pages took tens of seconds to load and had a single field to fill out, broken links to information, etc. I had to fill in my personal info three times, on different pages, with wildly different layouts and misspelled fields. It had to be done over four separate days, because two pages had 503 errors and a couple others told me to wait up to 5 business days for "procesing" or "processin" or other misspellings, though it only turned out to need a couple minutes or hours.
I watched my card for unexpected charges like a maniac as emails from different domains every time came in to inform me that I was still good to go. But the tickets came through fine, about 3 weeks later, less a week before my flight.
From reddit, I'm under the impression that this is a somewhat average experience.
Yeah I only book airline tickets direct at this point - Kayak has an option for that (which is sometimes ignored) and Google Flights does a good job. In the end though I just have my two standard vendors and am only mildly price sensitive.
probably this is different between different airlines and continents, and is definitely easier if you regularly fly with the same airline on the same route and know its flow, pricing and rules...
but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.
Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
And then there is the hell which is Ryanair, where you have to go through multiple pages of "no I don't want travel insurance", "no I don't want to rent a car", "no I don't want to buy fasttrack", "no I don't want to book a hotel with you", "no I don't want to buy a seat", "no I really don't want anything else"...
And all of these employ gray patterns like the "no I don't want it" button being less visible/prominent than the "I do want to pay more" button... (and this is not only true for Ryanair, but also for Austrian's "Upgrade to Economy Comfort" vs. "Continue with current fare", which conveniently shows before selecting if you want bags, seats, etc. where it actually could've been useful if it showed you that you can pay less)
Also most of the airline search sites don't allow you to filter non-stop flights, so if you're flexible on dates it will show you "cheaper flights" on other days, but instead of 2h flight from Vienna to Paris it's gonna be 5 hours because of a transfer in Amsterdam/Frankfurt...
What could be better would be "I want to select a seat at check-in, I want to fly with 1 checked bag and no carry-on bags, I don't want anything else, I want a non-stop flight, show me cheapest prices for this"...
I have to agree, it wasn't really so hard before Basic Economy was invented like 15 years ago and spread overnight to all carriers. You mostly just wanted the normal base ticket, or you wanted the much more expensive business class. But now each airline has their own byzantine distinctions and between the lowest type and the type that used to be the lowest. You then have to know that for X airline, the cheapest ticket includes (0 or 1) rollaboard size suitcases, and that bringing one will cost ($Y) per bag. And then do the math of whether you're better off paying a bag fee or paying for the next ticket up. And that's just the bag aspect.
> but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.
> Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
All of those different fares and their differences are clearly labeled (because the point of differentiation is to have the cheap options for the price conscious travellers, but to have actual benefits of the more expensive options so that they get picked). Luggage allowance is always clearly stated for instance, both during booking and afterwards on your booking details. (Compared to the US, at least with Delta, where if you want to know how much luggage you're allowed to have, they send you to a shitty form where you have to fill in trip details so that it tells you).
You have to click through multiple upsell pages, including "scary" boxes like "No, don't protect my $XXXX.XX purchase". And then "pick a seat", but once you do, it turns out there's actually a charge for that, so you click the browser back button, which ends up resetting your session.
For international flights, the prices on airlines' sites are almost always higher than what I was quoted in the search.
Running Firefox on Linux I often get stuck and need to switch to Chrome. Each time I hit Submit I get a dedicated page indicating it's loading the next one and there's always a noticeable probability I won't get to the next page.
I get why they have done it but it’s also a symptom of over segmenting the market based on time. The airlines have absolutely made this bed by having such adversarial pricing.
Airlines are by nature a risk-averse industry, and throwing something as fundamental as inventory out of whack would lead to unjustifiable losses. Threats need to be prevented not reacted to.
Imagine you're an airline and have the ability to hire smart people and can equip them with ai tools.
This is something that should be solved with a 2 person team over a weekend.
Airline prices are the absolute worse! I'm trying to book 5 tickets together between 2 major airports that I have flown multiple times in the past. The price has been a rollercoaster!
$2200, I waited a bit too long to confirm with the group
$4000 then $3500, then $2500 which changed within 5 minutes to $2600 and then $3000 and now $5000+
Other than memestocks, nothing else has such insane price volatility!
I forget if it was in an official airline or an aggregator. But the page had a built in time for deal expiration that was a standalone javacript timer.
Not sure how they can detect an agent driving a regular browser, I have built Cupertino to more efficiently let Claude drive my mac (https://cupertino.mgcrea.io) and it can drive a regular Safari exactly like I would.
> The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances.
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
Both things can be true. Airlines can be miserly rip-off artists, and we can start seeing lengthy waits at screening points because people had agents make their bookings and weren’t reminded about the things they aren’t allowed to pack.
How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
At this point it feels like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants I use online. I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible. I don’t want to take part in your giant human behavior optimization problem. You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?
Realistically though I know that’s not happening. I will continue to access online merchants in the way I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking. At least so far Claude is happy to play along but I suspect I will need to seek out an obliterated agent in the not to distant future. (Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)
I don’t think it’s hard to understand why an airline would get tired of getting more refund requests and customer service escalations for refusal of same according to agreed upon terms by entitled jerks who don’t want to accept the consequences of the decisions their ShitClaw made on their behalf.
Sure, the airline may not notice when it happens but it can cut those processes short when they have a full ban.
I shed no tears. Slowly the balance is shifting back towards fair. Wanna make me sit through 5 minutes of navigating your bullshit AI IVR before I talk to your bullshit AI assistant before I talk to someone who can actually help? Great, I'll delegate that to my AI also.
As long as you can pay the tokens. Otherwise you get to sit with the poors in the increasingly grotesque kafka madhouse, waiting in line to wait in line for the line...
Is it that, or is it that the agents don't sign up for all of the bullshit tricks they use, such as how it looks like you have to pay for an assigned seat when you can book a less desirable part of the plane for free? Agent won't fall for it, whereas some not inconsequential number of people do. Also, it'll destroy their AB test results.
When a company like Delta is on record using AI to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible [1], there's no longer any illusion about having a fair exchange of value, or an idea about who's behaving badly or not.
As someone who regularly gets quoted higher prices than others for the same airline ticket, I totally agree, but given that I know that airlines make razor-thin margins (often less than 5%), it's not totally obvious that this can be attributed to greed or malice. It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.
This is such a pervasive argument also used to justify a lot of bad stuff in tech ("if we don't do it, our competitors will" / "if you don't like it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me").
This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".
Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them. When prices were uniformly set by the government, there were 11 "trunk" airlines in 1978, 9 regional airlines, and three unregulated intrastate airlines- one was Southwest (flying just in Texas, the other two, Air California and PSA, were just in California). Those 23 airlines are now down basically to the Big 4 plus 3 little ones (Alaska, Jet Blue, Frontier). Airline tickets were more expensive- well, the prices were about the same number of dollars but thanks to inflation that's a lot less buying power.
> Which is actually worse than the regulated airlines were before Jimmy Carter deregulated them
Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?
Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?
What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.
> The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.
Or, you know…accept that a cat is a cat, and stop trying to regulate scratching simply because you don’t like it.
(I get that you probably understand this, but the “regulation is the solution” is kind of a leap. People whining about market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)
"The market" is not doing anything. My point is that there are rational agents making decisions here, and it's not even some intractable situation where you have 1,000 players and someone will necessarily be a scumbag. This is a small industry with a very high bar to entry. They don't get to pin it on market forces.
And I have actually heard "if you hate it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me from doing it" from a techie, and man... no. You have agency. You own this. If you need a regulator to stop you, you're not a good person, sorry. The market didn't make you do this. You just felt that it absolved you.
Sure, but are you looking to assign moral culpability or fix the problem? Because the market and regulatory environment is what ensures that the people you are judging to be bad will be the ones that are succeeding. It doesn't matter how bad you (or anyone else) think it is, if even a small fraction of people are willing to do it and they are rewarded for doing so, then they will be the people who are in a position to do it.
The interesting thing is that even though they got deregulated, the airline business is not a true free market.
So much of the business is mediated through limited realestate inside airports (which are a quasi-public organization).
That's some of the reason why there are monopolistic dynamics at play. Only so many planes can land at an airport and the times of day are restricted. This is true in every major urban city in the USA- NY, LA, SF, Chicago, etc.
My point is that it's totally unclear to me that that's how this happened. There were at least a few airlines that did not say "we're gonna try the same", such as People Express Airlines and ValuJet, which explicitly tried to market themselves as fair, cheap, and transparently priced. Those airlines don't exist anymore. They went out of business, mostly because the other airlines used sophisticated pricing schemes to sabotage them. Maybe this was a failure of antitrust. It's certainly much more complicated than "all the airlines colluded together". Given the fact that the surviving airlines were never able to reach a particularly profitable "recoupment phase" of the predatory pricing process, it seems that this did not actually result in unfair prices on average (although business customers obviously get shafted every time).
In other words, modern airlines gouge certain customers, but effectively subsidize others. I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
> I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
No, the thing they're doing is still awful.
The basic problem is that they do actually have competitors and are offering a product which is basically fungible, so their margins are inherently going to suck, even if they do every slimy thing, because then their competitors will just do the same thing and they're back to having thin margins only now they've made everything more deceptive/inconvenient/confusing.
The ideal thing in a market like that is to have an efficient way for customers to cut through the BS and find the best price for a ticket that isn't screwing them in covert ways, because then the deceptive tactics don't work, which takes away the incentive to do them. They'll still have thin margins, only with less deception.
But an individual airline can't unilaterally allow that if their competitors have a way to block it or they'd be at a competitive disadvantage, so they're going to try to stop that from happening. It's in no one's interest -- not even theirs -- to let them. They just need you to not let their competitors get away with it either.
“Good” schools are made up of their members. Good houses are largely a function of location, and community. Good groceries… I don’t know. Never knew this was an issue in the year 2026 outside of, like, North Korea.
I honestly don’t see the point of this comment, it’s not even that coherent. Are you saying poor communities should just go conjure up some “location” benefits, or conjure up some money to get more nutritious food? Please expand.
They are saying the biggest problem with the poor communities you're talking about is the people living in them. That seems true statistically no? Or at least, there's more data that supports that than the idea that there's magic soil in the rich communities.
Are we going to pretend like communities aren't shaped by their people now and everybody is just NPCs that has no influence over what their communities look like?
We can at least rule out that poor people can't make good communities because there are plenty of counterexamples that show otherwise.
Maybe if you took one step farther out, you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors. But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.
> But go on, keep blaming all your problems on the individual poor people that obviously have something wrong with them.
Well, I didn't say I had any problems so I'm not sure what you're even referencing here. Weird strawman
> you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors.
Oh spare me. This is like reaching algebra and thinking you've reached the frontier of mathematics in 2026. As if nature vs nurture wasn't drilled into every prepubescent brain in even the worst school systems in the west. It seems that you're the one that's unable to escape elementary pop psychology
I see from your history you have some incredibly bad takes and analogies that simply don’t work. Most of what you say I doubt even you understand. For your own sake, go get out of whatever bubble you’re in for 5 minutes.
Low IQ signal is focusing on the analogy instead of the point being made. You're still in grad school, spare me about bubbles. I very much doubt you have the kind of self awareness that warrants this kind of comment
Humans need a minimum of about 1,200 calories a day. If a human prices their services too low, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die. If a human prices their services too high, they won't be able to afford to eat and will die.
I know you think you said something interesting, but you really didn't. You can absolutely price your services however you want, and if you die pricing your services too high or low: well that was a silly thing to want.
That has nothing to do with what we are talking about though, and was not the point in the first place. An airline obviously cannot price their services too high or low and expect to survive. You didn't show how the user's comment made sense in the context that it was originally made, nor did you give a proper retort to my comment.
You just picked the wrong thing to focus on and contributed nothing to the conversation.
In the United States, you are not seriously at risk of being unable to consume 1200 calories a day, between SNAP, community food banks, and other state and local resources, unless you have a serious mental disorder or cognitive disability that would prevent you from being able to price your work in the first place.
You have my deepest sympathies, but to be clear, I would genuinely prefer to live in a world where airline pricing was more transparent and fair, I just can't attribute the fact that I don't live in that world to greed on the part of airlines
One of the most interesting things I recently discovered about airlines in the States is basically none of them make money selling airline tickets. It's break even at best. They are all credit card companies who happen to also fly people around.
> It's possible the airlines that set their prices "honestly" simply do not exist because they can't compete.
Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.
It doesn't have to be attributed to any negative moral stance. I think the people implementing these pricing schemes don't think they're in the wrong.
- It's that having an AI agent try to find me a lower price is a completely rational outcome of the situation.
But also note that a dynamic of consolidation in all industries seems to make financial transactions more and more adversarial- self-checkout (Walmart specifically), Amazon pricing, etc.
Yeah, this has that schoolyard "hey, no fair winning, new rule only I get the good ball!" energy all over it.
Unfortunately I expect this to get continually worse for the foreseeable future. We already have "we can use AI to crack things but you can't" pretty well in place and that is just the harbinger. Companies can use AIs to "nudge" us to their heart's content but we can't use AI to counter it is pretty obviously going to be something they push for.
We should be tech literate enough here to know that “AI” has become a near meaningless term that encompasses all sorts of technologies and the differences between the two version of AI in your comparison are big enough to make this a false equivalency.
The point isn't that both are using something that might be labeled AI. The point is that the relationship is 100% adversarial at this point, and so you shouldn't feel too bad for asking for a refund when your AI makes a mistake. The company certainly doesn't feel bad, and in fact puts huge amounts of effort into extracting the maximum value not just in general but from you specifically, so maybe just go ahead and do the same to them.
> The point is that the relationship is 100% adversarial at this point
If this was the intended point, it could be made in dozens of different ways from increasing baggage fees to decreasing legroom to the death of inflight meals. The specific example was obviously chosen because they can both be connected under the nebulous label of “AI” to make it seem more unfair.
Why stop at algorithms? Why not computers, electricity, or math? Some connections can be so loose as to be meaningless which makes attempts to establish them pointless or even potentially counterproductive.
What you are advocating is a race to the bottom for social norms. Instead lashing out at airlines with shitty business practices with your own shitty actions, maybe go to different ones.
I don't know the last time I looked for a flight and only had a single airline with routes. There's always better and worse options, but that's to be expected.
Yeah that's interesting, international may be more consolidated on route offerings.
I was only thinking about domestic as the topic was related to regulation. We don't have any impactful means of forcing or incentivizing international competition, power really stops at the nation-state.
I live in Chicago. Almost every route has at least 2 airlines (UA/AA). Many have 3 (WN). Some have 4 or 5. Sure maybe the schedule is not exactly the same, and in practice you want to keep to one airline for miles/status but there are very few routes where there is only one direct option and those are mainly international or very small cities. Obviously if you allow one layover then the options explode.
I guess there's are routes (Frankfurt) where technically there are two options but they don't really compete
I'm not advocating for a race to the bottom. I think we're at the bottom already, and sadly nothing we can do personally is going to change that.
I don't want people to go out of their way to hurt the companies, purposefully buying tickets they don't want and then refunding them or something. I'm just saying that on the occasion that a mistake happens, you shouldn't feel bad about using whatever legal/procedural recourse available so that you don't have to just eat the cost.
I would go for alternative airlines if there were any. Alas.
If there aren't any airlines you agree with you can stop flying. Ultimately the point is to not spend your money with a company whose business practices you so strongly disagree with. If that's the entire industry then so be it.
I've plainly stated that I don't think they are bad to the point you should go out of your way just to attack them.
I also didn't say they are evil, destroying the world or anything like that. If that's what I thought, then yeah, stopping doing business with them altogether might be the best course of action.
But I simply said that you shouldn't feel bad about making use of recourses made available to you by either the law or the company itself. Which I don't think it's at all incongruent with continuing to use these companies' services.
Okay, and when all the small mom and pop grocery stores are out of business and there's no place to buy food where the practices aren't shitty, what then? Stop eating? Take all that spare money that we know everyone has laying around (sarcasm, obviously), and buy a plot of land big enough to farm for your own subsistence?
I hope you can take the analogy here and realize how entirely divorced from reality the answer "just stop flying" is.
Why do you assume people mist be able to fly and travel at such high speeds? It's an amazing feat and hugely impressive, it isn't necessary.
And your example is absurd. If all local groceries disappear (many already have), and you care about knowing where your food comes from, yes you buy some land and do it yourself. I live on a farm and harvest our own meat including beef precisely because I don't know where meat at the grocery store came from and don't want to eat meat drenched in bleach.
Say more. Why can't a person vote with their wallet?
Voting in a democratic system is a perfect example of any one person having effectively zero impact while collectively the majority can rule.
The same holds for economics. If more people cared about how chickens were raised or slaughtered, for example, Tyson wouldn't be able to exist as it does today.
What different ones? Do you live in the US? There are 30ish percent less airlines than there were in 2009 due to consolidations. There are hubs where airlines monopolize entire airports and drive costs up.
Have you ever been to Europe, if you are living in the US? I'd like you to compare costs of flying regionally there compared to here.
Airlines are just another example of oligarchic control - it's incredible that people are expressing sympathy here as if the consumer and the airlines are on equal footing. I hope you enjoy your customized dynamic pricing based on personal information they've collected about you.
Over the years, I have shopped quite a bit (for me anyway) at Amazon. Up until last year, I never returned a single product (even when the product wasn't upto what the description promised). I haven't (yet) left a single bad review.
Since last year, I have returned a couple of items. I also have drastically reduced shopping at Amazon. I have a lot of patience compared to some people, who abuse Amazon's return policy. That said, there is a limit to anyone's patience.
What I am trying to say is - "maybe go to different ones" might not always be possible. If you are in a hurry to get somewhere (maybe a family member is in the hospital) and a United flight is the only one available, what then? Also, other airlines are not super great either.
Maybe for some household item I can shop around at leisure, but "maybe go to different ones" is not possible all the time. Plus, shopping is tiring and irritating as it is, not everyone wants to do PhD level research for every item they buy
Economy-class airline seats have generally become smaller, particularly in terms of legroom. Seat width has also declined. Why? Obviously higher capacity, greater revenue, segmentation to force upgrades.
The situation is even more noticeable because the average American passenger has grown larger. United also has hub dominance in concentrated areas, which leaves one with practically no choice. It is a race to the bottom.
If/when airlines figure out how to use GenAI to gouge folks they will. Airlines were so eager to enable GenAI and gut service to save money that they rolled out easily manipulated bots and lost money.
The article is about using "AI" for more frequently updated dynamic pricing. However, the company they hired says they don't use personal data. And logically, how would that even work? Price look-ups come from all sorts of aggregators via booking systems that don't helpfully pass along your info or allow Javascript to be ran to fingerprint your system/browser. It could work if you shop for fares on the airline's website.
> to set each individual shopper's price as high as possible
Or, equivalently, lower the price for those who couldn't afford it otherwise, while still remaining profitable. As others have said here, airlines are low margin, so what it means is that everyone who pays more effectively subsidize those who pay less.
How fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer. The wealthy business traveller will see it as price gouging, but will fly anyways because he can afford it, but the student will be able to fly when he otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Customers using AI for their advantage, as to pay less than they can afford will change the dynamic. Instead of a system where travelers pay as much as they can afford, we get to a system where those who don't know how to use technology to their advantage subsidize those who do, which, to me, is the least fair of all.
Now, you are free to use any trick you want to pay less, in the same way that airlines are using every trick to make you pay more, that's the game, and I am certainly playing it myself. The law and regulations are the rules, and to me, it does not unfairly favor the airlines, otherwise, they would have much higher margins.
> fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer.
"They're not screwing you over, it's just Affirmative Action for ticket pricing."
Or, alternatively, affirmative action (or welfare in general) is screwing over the rich and classes considered privileged.
Considering that most people here, me included are in those "privileged classes" and also at least middle class, then for most of us, affirmative action is the state screwing you over.
Now, if we had to name one company that really "screws you over" here, it is Nvidia, not the airline. They make insane margins, they are worth an insane amount of money, even after the recent crash, and they are the ones who profit on the AIs both customers and airlines use.
One interesting property of an unregulated free market is that sometimes the people with the most money get more free benefits and discounts than the poor people. An obvious example is the Oscars gift baskets where celebrities get free Rolexes etc. Credit cards are a more general example, where people with good credit get points / rebates, people with bad credit get more fees and 40% interest rates, etc.
Specific to the airlines, they give away billions of dollars in airline miles every year. Only the people with the most money to spend get those benefits.
> Specific to the airlines, they give away billions of dollars in airline miles every year.
This is effectively corruption (a kickback) and should probably be illegal.
Here is how it works: companies pay high price tickets for their employees business travels. But the ones who get the miles are the travelers. This is an incentive for employees on a business travel to pick the ticket that gives off the most miles that they can spend on personal travels. These are usually the tickets that make the airline most of their profits.
In general the points/rebates/... are hardly a gift. These are companies giving back a share of their profits when you buy high margin items. Most of the times I look at these, they are not worth it, as in: you get $10 worth of points on a $100 purchase that you can find for $50 elsewhere.
I think that you are misinterpreting their intent. Delta Air Lines' President Glen Hauenstein said:
> the company's AI price-setting technology sets fares by predicting "the amount people are willing to pay for the premium products related to the base fares."
It does not affect base fares, only "premium products" (upgrades?). I always use Google Flights to get high quality search across many airlines. The industry broadly publishes their base prices in Sabre. I don't see how AI can affect base prices for individual buyers.
United is not claiming that the reason for the ban is an increase in refund requests. Nor would they have to provide a full refund in any event, unless the ticket permitted, in which case they have little cause for complaint.
But sites that have been doing that have existed long before LLMs and AI agents. Google Flight is a good example. You see comprehensive price comparison across different airlines, click the cheapest and book it through airline website. How is this different?
Half right I think. It's the legit agents making efficient use of features which formerly were not costing the airline (on account of being used only rarely) and are now benefiting the travellers (because the agents know how to use them) that seem to be the cause here.
Yeah I think this is mostly CYA for the airline so they can point at some sort of artifact during a dispute and say "Look, you used an agent and violated ToS. No refund, end of discussion, close ticket."
Sure, it’s just like banning EA’s from booking flights on behalf of executives. Those certainly have more cancellations and customer service headaches than infrequent fliers.
What could possibly go wrong, rejecting bookings from people busy enough to want help woth mundane stuff like this?
Not only that, getting through support it’s nearby impossible for a regular human being, and it costs a lot of time.
I am at a point where whenever I have to deal with any online booking website, call it support or booking, I rather spin off an agent and spare me the pain.
The added satisfaction of fighting their claw with my claw adds some degree of satisfaction to it.
It’s not only about price, but also about my own mental sanity.
Ownership class using AI to get wealthier = good, anyone else using it to try and get fucked a little bit less in this shitshow we call capitalism = bad.
I think it's clear what they mean is that they want the airlines to sell their tickets without trying to modify our behavior. At least, that's what I got from their comment. Simply sell the tickets for what they are worth to the airline without offering deals to people based on their inferred profile.
> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible
It is still but you're not shopping around prices based off "you have a product, I have money". You're shopping around because "you have a product that others also sell and I will pay any one of you the least amount of money I can get away with".
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
I proactively answered this very question in my own comment. Initially they will try and block your chrome plugin and if they fail, then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website. More context in my own comment but this is a very reasonable question to ask.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
The endgame is just to raise prices for everyone.
It's not like airlines are making a ton of money. Everything affects their profits and small margins.
Do you mean stop gouging some customers based on information asymmetry? Doesn’t bother me.
Imagine if you just went to their site and honestly got the best price that day / week.
I’m actually skeptical that there are loss-leader seats being sold on normal routes (eg where one airline is not trying to force another out of business). Does anybody have a source for that? I have always assumed that low prices were to extract as much value as possible from a plane on a given route.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
Maybe they won't be able to stop you, but the average Joe won't be able to cover his tracks as effectively, or most likely, Claude Code and others will by default be required to assert the browser for the current session is being operated by an agent.
Average Joe will cover his tracks just as effectively. An average Joe will use the Claude Desktop app which opens a built-in browser where agent does the clicking - difficult to distinguish from a human doing the clicking.
Then again are you a large business that hides behind customer service agents (humans) that have no power to solve your problems, or hide behind automated email responses.
I recently received a "Dear Assholes, if you give an AI agent access to your account and it drains your funds, that's your problem" message from my bank, so I imagine this is them getting out in front of the problem.
Specifically, Karens calling customer service after the agent booked a $20k ticket in first class across the world and demanding refunds using the Bart Simpson defense (I didn't do it).
> I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible.
It is - these restrictions are part of the product. How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it. How much more would you pay in order to have a LLM purchase a ticket for you?
> How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it.
I agree. Complaining "I have money, now give me your product!" is tantamount to "I have a product, now give me your money!"
That said, this and so many other aspects of a functional capitalist society rely on customers and corporations having roughly equal leverage over one another. But since corporations have insanely centralized bargaining power as collectives, have bent the legal system in their favor at every turn, and are consistently overprivileged by technological innovation, I have long since abandoned any social contract with them.
Chrome has this architectural problem where the webpage can see what extensions you have installed. United could just refuse to run if you have that installed.
For the big corporations (consumer facing), they are not necessarily able to adopt change because:
1) they are under tremendous amount compliance boundaries, liabilities ambiguities and customer support issues, when agents go rogue or caused monetary damages to both service providers or merchants and consumers.
2) we collectively haven't figured out a way how agenic commerce would work. They have been some ideas floating around from Google, Shopify Cloudflare, but it nowhere near settled as a consensus.
3) Fraud/spam/cyber - Agents AMPLIFY these malicious interactions with their existing Human User Interface (HCI). In other words, the current HCI is not designed for agentic interactions.
For example: If your Meta Muse agent buys a $5k business class ticket from US to Europe using your Chase credit card that you find out after the fact, and you call your credit card companies for non-authorized transaction chargeback, who's responsible to the damages? Did you authorize the agent to buy tickets not?
If Chase denies your chargeback and make you liable for $5k to be paid, you pay for it or no? If you don't pay for it, United sues you in court, do you tell the judge you didn't authorize your agent to buy that ticket? Or you sue Meta instead? You see where this is going??
I agree with the main point. Just a clarification that if Chase denies your chargeback request, then the airline gets paid, and if you refuse to pay your credit bill, it'll be Chase coming after you (via lawsuit or whatever).
Seems pretty clear to me that the liability for the unauthorized charge is yours, and that it’s between you and the credit card company until the volume of errors is so large the other companies need to take note.
You have to be responsible for AI agent usage. Any other model doesn't work because then you can always argue "I didn't do it, my agent did" for anything.
The reason HF didn't win a legal battle is because they didn't sue, and they didn't sue because OpenAI is their business partner (or at least are closely wedded through their mutual partner Nvidia). If HF really wanted to press charges, it's very likely they would have won on any demonstrable claims of damage.
If HF did have any hard feelings about the event, they were likely settled with OpenAI out-of-court.
If I say "I'm thinking of visiting China sometime" and the Meta agent proactively decides to extracts my credit card number from my Meta subscription information, and proceeds to buy a ticket without my knowledge... I feel like at some point I get to blame Meta? Clearly I did not give any sort of consent there.
Conversely, if there's a chat log of me saying "Buy a ticket to China" and then clicking "yes" on an approval prompt showing the full price, ticket dates, etc. then yeah, obviously that one is on me.
I built something similar for my own agents. Before spending money or deleting anything, they need my approval on my phone.
A "yes" in the chat isn't enough. The agent could misunderstand, and logs can be modified. I wanted something more reliable: an approval outside the agent, using a passkey, tied to a specific request and impossible to reuse.
How do you make the agent's capability to spend money conditional on the A2H approval? Is it just an instruction in the prompt, or is there an enforcement mechanism? It seems to me like it would require cooperation from your bank (who needs to block transactions for which no A2H token is presented) and merchant (who needs to accept A2H tokens and communicate them to your bank with the other transaction details).
I tried to register a new account with Google yesterday to use their latest model, but they banned me after, like, five minutes. They asked me to scan a QR code with my phone and even asked for a selfie. After I completed all the steps, they told me I might be using a bot and that my account had been deleted...
But apparently, it’s okay for that same Google to unleash bots to scrape entire websites...
They won't with perfect accuracy, and I'm sure you're right that some methods will be a lot more difficult to detect reliably (e.g., a Muse agent that runs in a specific type of VM and is hosted in known data centers using specific network providers vs an LLM moving your laptop's cursor to navigate the website).
But pretty much every company that's involved with payment risk assessments, identity verification, or bot detection (Forter, Incode, Akamai, etc.) now has services they're trying to sell to merchants so that they can identify agentic traffic. Time will tell how effective they are with the different varieties of automation.
Some merchants want that capability to make sure legitimately authorized AI agents don't get unduly tangled in fraud prevention systems, but others, like United it seems, will use it to try to block them outright.
It's pretty easy to circumvent all those checks if you're doing normal-ish things (like doing a single series of searches to prepare to purchase a single flight) and their detection doesn't ban a large fraction of non-bot customers. Those companies might sell bot detection, but it only works against the poorly coded bots and legitimately abusive accounts (sometimes) if you don't turn the false positive dial way up.
just fyi: I think you and parent poster mean abliterated models, not obliterated. They are not destroyed, rather some weights are ablated, thus abliteration or ablation.
The relationship is unfortunately different nowadays. «You have money, we are going to manipulate you». When the profit demands on them being able to manipulate you, an AI is bad news.
I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible - right, and then your child spends 100k in amazon orders and we blame the merchants for not having better checks. Or the state fines the merchant for not ensuring that a person did indeed check in or attest to something personally. How do you prove the LLM collected your TOS agreement? I used to, but having engineered multiple systems in regulated industries, automation will never as simple as we want it to be.
The product-for-money part is never the problem. It's always the refunds, the chargebacks, the customer service complaints, the person filing a complaint with regulators.
A lot of the systems that relied on low levels of these situations are about to be tested by waves of agents doing everything they can to take advantage of the rules: Chargebacks, complaints, refunds, cancellations.
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
They need to make a best-effort demonstration that they are complying with the federal regulations.
The federal regulations require that flyers see notices about banned luggage and other requirements. The article covers this.
The thing is, they don't need to go to extremes to detect and ban everything. They can state their policy and then they have some coverage if regulators come knocking.
I would guess they're also dealing with the same problems that occur in other spaces involving reservations: AI agents tend to operate greedily and optimistically by default. A common situation in other industries is that they'll read a cancellation policy, then proactively make a reservation before asking the user if they want it. The agent will try to hold a spot and then schedule a cancellation before the window ends (example, 23 hours into a 24 hour cancellation period) and wait for the user to confirm.
As a result, the churn rate for agent-created reservations is very different than when humans do it, which breaks a lot of assumptions and financial expectations.
Unregulated spaces like restaurants can charge a non-refundable reservation fee or threaten cancellation fees (which is enough to scare off agents, for now at least) but regulated spaces like airlines may be required to process cancellations according to some rules. So now if you have agents everywhere exhibiting reservation/cancellation behavior that nobody expected and it's changing suddenly with each new update of Meta Muse or other system, it gets messy.
AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions. When an agent running 24/7 with a goal of maximizing its owners' happiness starts doing things, some of these systems break down.
So I can see multiple reasons why they'd want to officially disallow it. I would expect that making it a formal rule is enough to start getting Claude, Meta Muse, and others to add a guardrail forbidding it too.
Not going to stop the motivated individual running OpenRouter tokens and some complex local agent setup, but that's such a small number of people it can be ignored.
> AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions.
Perhaps Delta might have considered this when they introduced AI-driven price optimization ("what is the absolute highest we think this human will bear for this flight?"), not "Oh, we only ever assumed we'd be the ones to use AI for optimization purposes!".
Users have been locked down for decades on platforms with their dark UI patterns and rules. I welcome the user agent revolution in shopping, and put an end to the information asymmetry. We need to use AI to optimize our choices. Who can browse down to page 40 for the one honest product under all the ad crap.
The AI provlems right now are that 1. investors expect your have the AI boost, 2. competitors already use it, and cloning anything is easy now 3. customers use agentic shopping. This thread is about no 3, but a company that does nothing AI still finds itself dealing with all of them. It's a new world.
Because Claude can be legally compelled to advertise its "claude" acting on behalf of a human? Such a policy isn't that crazy.
Now sure you could bypass this by running your own harness/tooling, but then you'd be in breach of laws. There's various policies like this today around web scraping
The problem is that AI agents play all sorts of games to get better prices, and this guzzles resources that are supposed to be for dealing with legitimate problems. e.g. If an airline is dealing with an AI caller that's rescheduling a flight it intentionally booked at the wrong time to shave a few bucks off an airfare, somebody who needs to cancel a flight to attend a funeral will wait longer in line.
Airlines and other companies are faced with a choice: Let everything go to shit for people who don't use AI agents, or start discouraging the use of AI agents. It will be interesting to see whether companies embrace anti-AI AI agents or try to weight the penalties such that deterrence is achieved without them. e.g. Would you continue using an AI agent to book flights if you faced a potential lifetime ban from that airline?
The problem is that airlines play all sorts of games to get higher prices, and this guzzles resources that are supposed to be for dealing with legitimate problems.
It works both ways. If they can use AI to charge me more, I should be able to use AI to save a few dollars.
If you’re actually arguing they should set a fair, stable price and I should pay it, then I agree. But that shipped sailed decades ago.
Using AI bots makes you more of a problem than the airline using AI to price seats. I can choose to fly another airline if I don't want AI-pricing, but that only works if jackasses aren't using their bots to snatch up seats they have not intention of actually sitting in.
I can choose to fly another airline if I don't want AI-pricing
Can you though? How would you even know? All I know is airline pricing has been a bit of a blackbox for as long as I've been a buyer of the tickets. Even if they aren't using AI, they're still playing games. And if they're games are such that using an AI on the buyer side, that's what people will use.
And to be clear, I have no desire to use AI to buy my tickets, certainly not the "buy now, refund tomorrow, buy again, repeat until flight time" stuff proposed in comments. I just want a ticket at a fair price, which to me basically means "roughly the same price the guy next to me paid"
> that only works if jackasses aren't using their bots to snatch up seats they have not intention of actually sitting in.
I share your hatred for all the stupid ways people are outsourcing their thinking to linear algebra. But isn't this problem self-solving? Airlines will figure out how to identify AI-purchased tickets, and if a significant fraction of them aren't actually flown, they'll adjust their overbooking setup.
Meanwhile, the AI maximalists are having their wallet drained. Always a fan of that.
The "ban" doesn't have to be an actual technical ban, but a "ban" in the sense that you automatically forfeit your rights to customer service or a refund if a human doesn't do the booking.
They can ban you by name and birthdate combo, united mileage number, and/or your debit/credit card pan if detected. They have no obligation to allow you to purchase air travel online, it is their right to refuse you service.
(know folks inside United, but not speaking in any way for the company, I just know how the process works, as a curious security person)
>How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
Just like other companies that have similar low alternative services. They let you do it. They log and flag and as soon as you have a problem, instead of working to solve it, they see you are on the flagged list and you are now banned from the service. People who find themselves banned from an airline when they miss a connection or report lost luggage have done some other activity that got them to be flagged as a potential unwanted customer.
they don't care if you do that, because as far as they're concerned it's you that booked that ticket. you can't turn around and demand a refund or sue them because it "wasn't you, it was your agent".
they just don't want the possible liability of dealing with whatever legalities that might occur from autonomous agent usage. and i can't really blame em for that.
You don't seem to understand, it's fine for them to use AI to use "dynamic pricing" but for you to navigate their ridiculous refund/claim processes, using AI, that's "unfair"
They're going to put it in their terms of carriage that if you use an AI agent to book a flight they get to dump you in the middle of the Pacific. Hope you're a good swimmer.
I made a Chrome plugin for VRBO sites that parsed pet policy on vacation homes as the info was all over the listing and not consistent for visual parsing. In spite of aggressive backoff, a weekend's worth of usage by me and vrbo put the kibosh on my IP.
I have booked several flights using cdp browsing with my local agent. The more friction they add for agents, the more there will be for humans and the market will vote with their feet (or agents).
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
They don’t.
When a dispute that either party(you or United airlines in this theoretical case) decides to litigate an argument far enough that it becomes clear you used an AI agent like Claude then you are going to run afoul of the CFAA[1] and are going to get fucked legally because they stated who could access their site and you violated it with your agents against their stated will.
This is a legal ward, not a technical one. Violate it at your own peril.
Can you cite a single DoJ case where a person was indicted for using an LLM user agent to access otherwise publicly-accessible resources under the provisions of the CFAA?
But if you are violating their terms for access then you still violated their terms for access. Then its up to a court to decide if a case it brought forth.
So this is why United airlines and all the other folks should open up an API or MCP server for agents. When you do that, you make it easy for the agent to do the right thing, and go through a known access point which you can control and rate limit.
The user also has more fine grained permission over the interaction. They could choose to give permissions just to read account details or flight info or to actually make a purchase. United knows it's an agent acting.
Of course, unbehaved agents will still go around, but by providing a golden path, the better behaved ones will be better citizens.
The alternative is, as parent comment suggests, a user can allow Claude to drive their browser. Then, apart from heuristics, United Airlines can't really tell the difference between Claude driving the browser and a user driving the browser. Therefore you have less granular permissions and more unbounded actions and risk. There is no way to audit what is done by a human being versus by an agent. And United Airlines still has agents interacting with their site.
Can agents use that? I just tried (via Claude Desktop) and was asked to install the Chrome extension, so my guess is "yes". But haven't confirmed (letting an agent drive my browser makes me uneasy).
I don't think they're actually trying to stop you. Rather it's a public stance to protect them from customers' misaligned agents. They don't want to be liable for actions your agent took on your behalf; e.g. refunding a ticket when your agent bought the wrong one.
It's about segmentation or price discrimination. I was able to get the same hotel room $50/night cheaper when my agent browsed from a different country for example.
I don't know but given the fact we now live in a post-truth era and heavy AI agent/assistants users now embrace heavily hallucinations and have stopped checking output quality and sources anymore like they used to in 2024 and early 2025, I would do the opposite. Detect AI use as much as possible and charge them more automatically as the customer behind becomes the easiest to trick.
You can better understand the context here if you go read between the lines of the Amazon vs Perplexity case, and take a look at the appeal - who else was supporting Amazon? You will notice a trade group called Airlines for America.
Why is this? If you go look at the financial statements of airlines (for which Airlines for America is the industry trade group), you will understand that a large portion of their profits come from monetizing human friction and attention.
Imagine things like upsells for their branded credit cards, feeding into the points game, etc. These are all things that appeal to humans, but that agents are almost certainly going to skip and then relentlessly price-compare the flight at the end of the funnel.
Now, once Amazon’s appeal was denied by the court, it became obvious that they needed to resort to technical solutions if they could not block it by trying to leverage the CFAA. Therefore, these industries are now implementing technical solutions.
Ultimately, personal agents are a huge consumer benefit, but they challenge the business models underlying much of the internet. I expect to see more of this kind of behavior from incumbents, which ironically leaves them vulnerable to disruption by players who do support agents, as this market shift plays out.
It is possible to detect Claude controlling your Chrome browser, as well as many computer use agents. Give this a try: https://demo.switchfrog.com. Ultimately though the mainstream agents will (and mostly already do) self-identify and businesses will adapt.
Source: I am the founder of a company in the space, Switchfrog.
Right? I'm having Claude code reverse engineer the skills needed to feel "human" in its Playwrite driver right now. Over 95% human for the task so far... I'm baking the learnings into my scraping and agent scripts going forward.
Makes much more sense now. Airlines have these partnerships which they advertise on their websites, app and everywhere, by using AI agents these ad spots are not performing as intended hence they do not want that to happen. But i think soon ads inside apps and services like these may evolve into something else maybe ads for agents but how exactly thats gonna work i am not sure!
If this takes off and agents struggle to bypass it, someone will set up Mechanical Turk style services to provide an API to people carrying out the steps. And use it to collect all the data needed to use it to bypass more and more detection attempts.
Why would they need to stop you? Why can't you voluntarily respect their wishes? What's with this entitlement that AI users have that they have a right to unleash their automation on services that have made it clear that they do not want that.
Ideally the wish to not have your service accessed by automation should also be legally enforceable. And we need clear precident that users and operators of automation are 100% liable for the damages they cause.
If you look at how airlines make money, you'll see that an agent skipping over the airline website's internal ads for the loyalty program, credit card partners, pushy upsells of seating/refundability, etc...destroys their revenue model. Not endorsing this approach of just banning agents, but it's easy to see why they don't know what to do yet.
Because the product is often not what we think it is anymore.
Surely the airline company makes money with the actual flight... but also they might start to make money with selling private data. Maybe they even start to make MORE money due to a commission on car rental, hotel, tourist attraction, etc than the actual flight.
The "product", due to pressure from competition, enshittification, novel alternatives, is changing and we as customers don't necessarily notice it. In fact the company is probably doing its very best so that we don't and can thus benefit with side effects that we are not aware of, otherwise we would ask for compensation.
So... I'm not justifying the practice but also business wise, it makes sense that they try to keep control of everything around their product.
The misunderstanding is that they're not selling flights, they're mainly selling insurances and credit cards. The valuation of some airlines' loyalty programs is higher than their company valuation. That is: operating flights comes at a loss. Flights are just the bait, and then the process is designed to extract maximum value from the caught human through phsychological tricks. Agents are not so suspectible to those tricks, so the airline doesn't make enough money.
It’s pretty easy to stop Claude or ChatGPT since they won’t fill CAPTCHAS or get around any step designed to stop them. They play nice. 99% of the population couldn’t figure out how to run any model that doesn’t.
So while it’s not an impenetrable barrier, it will almost completely solve the problem they’re trying to.
HN attracts the most obtuse, oblivious, disconneted and out-of-touch people around. I'm here fo the educated idiots. Your comment is a classic. It seems not even AI can save Silicon Valley it's own stupidity. Hilarious.
It's similar to asking "how does airport security plan on stopping me from smuggling weapons on the airplane?". They'll say you can't, and try to stop you to some degree of success, and if they catch you, you get in trouble. The fact that some people are able to successfully violate their policy isn't a justification for not having it.
Prediction: For a short time we'll see a market for services where humans will act as flesh-puppets for agents.
Mostly for offline services not otherwise accessible to agents (e.g. things requiring physical presence), but also for things where providers are get sufficiently aggressive at blocking that it's cheaper to provide an API to request a human to do something than playing cat and mouse with blocking attempts.
Mostly - beyond fringe services - for a short time because most of the gaps people are willing to pay for will be closed by proper automation pretty quickly.
The service called Going (formerly known as Scott's Cheap Flights) reminds me of this.
It's a subscription service to be alerted to cheap flights from your airport(s) of choice.
Essentially a few people scan Google Flights every day looking for flights that are priced abnormally low; if they find something, they send out alerts.
Technically, this is made worse by the human in the loop. A computer program could analyze this data more quickly, more accurately, etc.
Legally, it would be against Google's terms of service for Google Flights to do this programmatically. So there are some people just running essentially the same searches every day.
And Going even credits which employee found each deal (I suspect to make it very clear that there is a human in the loop and they are not violating Google's TOS).
But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of this sort of thing.
I'm kinda suspicious of the stated motives. while plausible, has it happened very much? The cynic in me thinks this is to prevent agents hunting and findingthe best deals, and avoiding all the patterns used to squeeze more money from the buyer, like dangling attractive offers, not so obvious navigation and other tricks etc..
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 69.1 ms ] threadWhat if the airlines instead focused on delivering great service at a competitive price?
"Nah, let's escalate this arms race instead."
Germania tried that in the late 90s, offering a flat fare for every seat.
They had to roll it back within a few weeks because their bookings dropped dramatically - nobody wanted to pay a fair price for a seat, even if it was cheaper than they might have had to pay under dynamic pricing. All they fixated on was that the flat fares were more than the few cheap seats on rival airlines.
The market can remain irrational linger than you can remain solvent etc etc
How much can it cost? And if it's so expensive, wouldn't intermediaries who cache results actually be cheaper?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software
ITA, in particular, is memorable as a HN favorite because their software was pretty much 100% lisp, at least before the google acquisition.
That seems like a completely reasonable response. The vendors are acting like a cartel. The behavior is illegal (they do not honor lowest advertised prices), and the courts are too bought off to step in.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/delta-united-jetblue...
It’s an industry AI vs consumer AI arms race, and industry sure doesn’t want the consumer to win.
Some of the points they raise, I do think are cause for concern as it relates to potential legal liabilities... but I don't see how they could possibly restrict AI usage meaningfully, besides just getting the big popular groups to assist in limiting their own services somehow, which doesn't solve the issue entirely of course, especially with local LLM usage on the rise.
It's mostly a commodity, specially for economy class where price matters. After gas and grocery, its the most vicious, cut throat business where a customer will switch from United to Delta over $5.
It sounds counterproductive but personal AI agents cause a local optima while overall increasing cost for rest of the travelers.
For example, if you had an MCP connector to United and found a flight from SFO to DEN for $50, the rest of the seats have to go up in price to compensate and not just by a few cents because the nominal cost of an economy seat is likely $250, not $50.
Now United isn't against offering a $50 flight to customers who they deem "worth it" - they just don't want it to be anyone who can run an MCP connector. They are just betting that the "worth it" will "make it up" in the long run vs. a customer who's just there for the $50 seat.
What happens if you say "screw it, I'll code my own custom MCP connector to United.com!"
Well, eventually they will try and block you and then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website.
I don’t know anyone that’s seen a cheap flight for sale and decided to wait for the price to go up.
There are less price sensitive customers, but even the most price sensitive people don’t ask United if they could please charge them a bit more than the listed price.
Later on, assuming all of the carriers are affected by this, flights will get more expensive and maybe we will invest in other modes of transport that is cheaper
If this is indeed the case -- good riddance to that practice! Why should I be sorry that it goes?
Actually if I ran an airline I’d try to prevent everyone from being able to snipe the best seats with their agents as soon as they came out. Using lotteries, special manual two factor authentication etc.
The effort you (and others) are willing to go to get the $50 doesn't seem to match up with the "fine, the practice should go". If it doesn't matter, why expend effort to do it?
If agents make finding cheaper tickets trivial and the default, customers lose that choice.
Of course everyone wants the $50 tickets, so the market gets all weird trying to both fill flights and charge as much as possible, while being competitive with other airlines that are trying to do the same thing. Because there are competing airlines, the final margins stay low, so the airlines are barely "maximizing" profits so much as they are simply maintaining profitability.
But once the company starts defining "worthy of cheap tickets" groups the system becomes very murky; and murky systems impose costs on everyone.
Your premise is false, as it rests on the logic that there is a zero sum game between passengers. Airlines offer tickets at the level and price they feel like they can sell them in the marketplace. There's not some invisible total allocated to passengers on each flight, where if one person "gets a deal" others pay for it.
In your example ($50/$100), the airline is extracting all consumer surplus. This is called perfect price discrimination, and it is bad for consumers.
There is nothing stopping the airline offering Bob $50 per seat in the second scenario, other than profit preservation. If they were making a profit on the $50 ticket in the first scenario, they are making it in the second. They just happen to also be making less profit on the $100 ticket.
In effect you are making corporate profit a constraint on the market, which is not the case.
Your example actually shows that the welfare extractive pricing algos companies use today can be undermined by AI, which is good for consumers in this narrow example.
But isn’t this the same argument, more or less, that police make for not wanting to have body cameras on all the time, because they would then be “forced” to give everyone who was breaking the law a ticket or to arrest them instead of letting them go if it “feels like they should”?
The analogy being that the police could pick and choose who they should arrest versus who they should not and let off with a warning - who is “worth it” (i.e. generally, people of, umm, not color, it turns out).
Anyways… it does seem that some kinda of preferential treatment could be lost here. But preferential good treatment for some is kind preferential bad treatment for others, so theres that.
Feel free to ridicule my argument.
Your sentence and the comment you linked say completely different things. You say airlines are trying to reduce prices for everyone, the comment says they're trying to achieve perfect price discrimination to maximize revenue. Those are not the same thing.
Since you explain that the rest of us are effectively paying for that subsidised seat, I’m okay with this.
I also wanted to play with some ideas I have around approval of agentic actions and sharing of credentials. I can selectively share browser cookies with my MCP server and it'll inject them into browsers the agent can use for a limited scoped task. I use a decision API to try and see if the browser actions match the approved work or if they're going awry. This is generally preferable (for me) vs just handling my credentials over and letting the agents YOLO with their cloud browser. I get saved recordings sent to my phone.
I guess the best option is, to use a good reseller/travel agency that provides an API/MCP for booking and managing flights.
For finding the cheapest deals agents can still be used. Just the booking itself is probably better done manually. It also eliminates the risk that the agent does something stupid.
edit: they might try to block agents, but this won't be possible with browser use. they can always throttle users by IP or fingerprint. Letting an agent book a flight might be risky, because they might cancel a booking or impose a fee if they somehow detect it.
I often use Kayak or google flights to screen multiple airlines, but once I've found a flight I like, I generally book it on the airline's site, and the UI is basically identical to Kayak. Put in some dates, some locations, click search, browse through the options, pick the one you want. If you are flexible on dates, there is a little +/- 3 days checkbox that will show a table of flight prices.
I'm probably stupid, but what are the improvements that would help customers find the best deals?
Now, if you're buying from consolidators on their consistently-shady-looking sites, which will contact you later with your ticket if they got it at all: oh yeah those are sometimes total insanity.
Many pages took tens of seconds to load and had a single field to fill out, broken links to information, etc. I had to fill in my personal info three times, on different pages, with wildly different layouts and misspelled fields. It had to be done over four separate days, because two pages had 503 errors and a couple others told me to wait up to 5 business days for "procesing" or "processin" or other misspellings, though it only turned out to need a couple minutes or hours.
I watched my card for unexpected charges like a maniac as emails from different domains every time came in to inform me that I was still good to go. But the tickets came through fine, about 3 weeks later, less a week before my flight.
From reddit, I'm under the impression that this is a somewhat average experience.
but generally in Europe many airlines will by default show you only the base fare price without carry-on bags, checked bags, seats, etc., and the surcharges aren't fixed (some flights may have cheaper bags, seats, than the others, on the same airline), and then there are multiple levels of "Economy" pricing with some of the options packaged into the price (e.g. Austrian has "Economy Basic", "Economy Light", "Economy Comfort", "Economy Flex"), but sometimes buying Economy Basic + baggage + seat may be cheaper than Economy Comfort.
Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
And then there is the hell which is Ryanair, where you have to go through multiple pages of "no I don't want travel insurance", "no I don't want to rent a car", "no I don't want to buy fasttrack", "no I don't want to book a hotel with you", "no I don't want to buy a seat", "no I really don't want anything else"...
And all of these employ gray patterns like the "no I don't want it" button being less visible/prominent than the "I do want to pay more" button... (and this is not only true for Ryanair, but also for Austrian's "Upgrade to Economy Comfort" vs. "Continue with current fare", which conveniently shows before selecting if you want bags, seats, etc. where it actually could've been useful if it showed you that you can pay less)
Also most of the airline search sites don't allow you to filter non-stop flights, so if you're flexible on dates it will show you "cheaper flights" on other days, but instead of 2h flight from Vienna to Paris it's gonna be 5 hours because of a transfer in Amsterdam/Frankfurt...
What could be better would be "I want to select a seat at check-in, I want to fly with 1 checked bag and no carry-on bags, I don't want anything else, I want a non-stop flight, show me cheapest prices for this"...
> Also the rules of what is included in which package differ from the route (longer routes have more included), and from the operating airline (e.g. Air France website also allows you to book lower cost Transavia flights, Austrian/Lufthansa websites also allow you to book lower cost Eurowings/Discover flights...)
All of those different fares and their differences are clearly labeled (because the point of differentiation is to have the cheap options for the price conscious travellers, but to have actual benefits of the more expensive options so that they get picked). Luggage allowance is always clearly stated for instance, both during booking and afterwards on your booking details. (Compared to the US, at least with Delta, where if you want to know how much luggage you're allowed to have, they send you to a shitty form where you have to fill in trip details so that it tells you).
Running Firefox on Linux I often get stuck and need to switch to Chrome. Each time I hit Submit I get a dedicated page indicating it's loading the next one and there's always a noticeable probability I won't get to the next page.
- 24 hours to cancel any flight (or some airlines let you reserve with a 24 hour window to pay, which also fits the regulation)
- Seats that are sold cannot be sold to another passenger during this window (it's removed from inventory in GDS)
Now imagine you have people using agents to do the following:
- Book and cancel flights regularly to try to save a few bucks
- Set up an agent "if prices hit $xxx, book immediately and then cancel within 24 hours unless I tell you otherwise"
You suddenly have an inventory problem that can effectively DoS an airline.
This is something that should be solved with a 2 person team over a weekend.
Airline prices are the absolute worse! I'm trying to book 5 tickets together between 2 major airports that I have flown multiple times in the past. The price has been a rollercoaster!
$2200, I waited a bit too long to confirm with the group $4000 then $3500, then $2500 which changed within 5 minutes to $2600 and then $3000 and now $5000+
Other than memestocks, nothing else has such insane price volatility!
I believe the 24 hours free cancellation requirement is only valid 7 days out. If it's for a recent flight I don't think you get free cancellation?
CBS being, probably the most reliable and spin-free reporting, I believe the article.
That’s ridiculous.
They just want to keep their price list miserable to compare so they can overcharge people.
At this point it feels like I have an adversarial relationship with many merchants I use online. I wish the simple “you have a product, I have money” relationship was possible. I don’t want to take part in your giant human behavior optimization problem. You have a product and I have money why does it have to be more complicated than that?
Realistically though I know that’s not happening. I will continue to access online merchants in the way I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking. At least so far Claude is happy to play along but I suspect I will need to seek out an obliterated agent in the not to distant future. (Once the corporate capture of the frontier cloud AI models is complete.)
Sure, the airline may not notice when it happens but it can cut those processes short when they have a full ban.
[1] https://mashable.com/article/airlines-set-prices-artificial-...
This is a small world. The US has something like ten major airlines. Eight if you don't count subsidiaries. Someone at the first one made a decision to embrace an exploitative pricing model. And then, someone at the second airline looked at this and thought to themselves, "you know, we're not gonna organize a PR campaign to stigmatize it, we're gonna try the same".
The rest, such as Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Allegiant - are all discount and/or regional airlines.
For example, allegiant flies to most cities secondary airports that are 1-2 hours drive from the city.
EDIT: It's really 4 equally large ones by passenger miles:
* 1 Delta Air Lines 17.8%
* 2 American Airlines 17.5%
* 3 Southwest Airlines 17.3%
* 4 United Airlines 16.0%
The rest are sub 10%
why?
given "Airline tickets were more expensive"
Worse than when the government set, not just the maximum, but also the minimum price an airline could charge for a ticket? You're saying that time, when price competition was literally illegal, was better than today?
Is there any chance that you're not actually old enough to remember that time?
What, pray tell, is the advantage of competition when the competitors are forced by the government to charge the same price for the same route? And not just forced to charge the same price, oh no! But forced to charge a price higher than railroads (which cost more to operate than airlines), so as not to outcompete railroads, which are both slower and more expensive to operate.
It's like getting mad at your cat for killing a bird - it's just what cats do.
The answer to this behavior isn't being mad at or boycotting particular airlines, it is regulation.
Or, you know…accept that a cat is a cat, and stop trying to regulate scratching simply because you don’t like it.
(I get that you probably understand this, but the “regulation is the solution” is kind of a leap. People whining about market pricing have always struck me as just fundamentally misunderstanding what capitalism is.)
And I have actually heard "if you hate it, you should have asked the regulators to stop me from doing it" from a techie, and man... no. You have agency. You own this. If you need a regulator to stop you, you're not a good person, sorry. The market didn't make you do this. You just felt that it absolved you.
So much of the business is mediated through limited realestate inside airports (which are a quasi-public organization).
That's some of the reason why there are monopolistic dynamics at play. Only so many planes can land at an airport and the times of day are restricted. This is true in every major urban city in the USA- NY, LA, SF, Chicago, etc.
In other words, modern airlines gouge certain customers, but effectively subsidize others. I would be unambiguously outraged only if they were gouging everyone and making fat stacks.
No, the thing they're doing is still awful.
The basic problem is that they do actually have competitors and are offering a product which is basically fungible, so their margins are inherently going to suck, even if they do every slimy thing, because then their competitors will just do the same thing and they're back to having thin margins only now they've made everything more deceptive/inconvenient/confusing.
The ideal thing in a market like that is to have an efficient way for customers to cut through the BS and find the best price for a ticket that isn't screwing them in covert ways, because then the deceptive tactics don't work, which takes away the incentive to do them. They'll still have thin margins, only with less deception.
But an individual airline can't unilaterally allow that if their competitors have a way to block it or they'd be at a competitive disadvantage, so they're going to try to stop that from happening. It's in no one's interest -- not even theirs -- to let them. They just need you to not let their competitors get away with it either.
Where is the sympathy for me? Why do only large corporations get to use the "competition" excuse?
But anyhow, you see the problem.
They are saying the biggest problem with the poor communities you're talking about is the people living in them. That seems true statistically no? Or at least, there's more data that supports that than the idea that there's magic soil in the rich communities.
Are we going to pretend like communities aren't shaped by their people now and everybody is just NPCs that has no influence over what their communities look like?
We can at least rule out that poor people can't make good communities because there are plenty of counterexamples that show otherwise.
Well, I didn't say I had any problems so I'm not sure what you're even referencing here. Weird strawman
> you would see that the reasons some people and communities are poor are due to external factors.
Oh spare me. This is like reaching algebra and thinking you've reached the frontier of mathematics in 2026. As if nature vs nurture wasn't drilled into every prepubescent brain in even the worst school systems in the west. It seems that you're the one that's unable to escape elementary pop psychology
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
…
Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
You cannot price your services however you want.
That has nothing to do with what we are talking about though, and was not the point in the first place. An airline obviously cannot price their services too high or low and expect to survive. You didn't show how the user's comment made sense in the context that it was originally made, nor did you give a proper retort to my comment.
You just picked the wrong thing to focus on and contributed nothing to the conversation.
Or perhaps it’s simply not a functioning competitive market in the first place, for a variety of reasons including obvious ones like large barriers to entry.
- It's that having an AI agent try to find me a lower price is a completely rational outcome of the situation.
But also note that a dynamic of consolidation in all industries seems to make financial transactions more and more adversarial- self-checkout (Walmart specifically), Amazon pricing, etc.
Unfortunately I expect this to get continually worse for the foreseeable future. We already have "we can use AI to crack things but you can't" pretty well in place and that is just the harbinger. Companies can use AIs to "nudge" us to their heart's content but we can't use AI to counter it is pretty obviously going to be something they push for.
If this was the intended point, it could be made in dozens of different ways from increasing baggage fees to decreasing legroom to the death of inflight meals. The specific example was obviously chosen because they can both be connected under the nebulous label of “AI” to make it seem more unfair.
They are using algorithms to extract the highest price from you.
You can use algorithms to extract the lowest price from them.
Capitalism is based on the premise that everyone will be as greedy as possible
some specific routes may have de facto monopoly but many, many are not
On many routes, especially between continents there is only one option.
I was only thinking about domestic as the topic was related to regulation. We don't have any impactful means of forcing or incentivizing international competition, power really stops at the nation-state.
I guess there's are routes (Frankfurt) where technically there are two options but they don't really compete
I don't want people to go out of their way to hurt the companies, purposefully buying tickets they don't want and then refunding them or something. I'm just saying that on the occasion that a mistake happens, you shouldn't feel bad about using whatever legal/procedural recourse available so that you don't have to just eat the cost.
I would go for alternative airlines if there were any. Alas.
I've plainly stated that I don't think they are bad to the point you should go out of your way just to attack them.
I also didn't say they are evil, destroying the world or anything like that. If that's what I thought, then yeah, stopping doing business with them altogether might be the best course of action.
But I simply said that you shouldn't feel bad about making use of recourses made available to you by either the law or the company itself. Which I don't think it's at all incongruent with continuing to use these companies' services.
Okay, and when all the small mom and pop grocery stores are out of business and there's no place to buy food where the practices aren't shitty, what then? Stop eating? Take all that spare money that we know everyone has laying around (sarcasm, obviously), and buy a plot of land big enough to farm for your own subsistence?
I hope you can take the analogy here and realize how entirely divorced from reality the answer "just stop flying" is.
And your example is absurd. If all local groceries disappear (many already have), and you care about knowing where your food comes from, yes you buy some land and do it yourself. I live on a farm and harvest our own meat including beef precisely because I don't know where meat at the grocery store came from and don't want to eat meat drenched in bleach.
Voting in a democratic system is a perfect example of any one person having effectively zero impact while collectively the majority can rule.
The same holds for economics. If more people cared about how chickens were raised or slaughtered, for example, Tyson wouldn't be able to exist as it does today.
some time ago I was thinking that "well, these dark patterns are there, but I am buying from Ryanair so what I expected"
and then I was buying from more upscale company and it had literally the same dark patterns trying to mislead and upsell you
Have you ever been to Europe, if you are living in the US? I'd like you to compare costs of flying regionally there compared to here.
Airlines are just another example of oligarchic control - it's incredible that people are expressing sympathy here as if the consumer and the airlines are on equal footing. I hope you enjoy your customized dynamic pricing based on personal information they've collected about you.
Fuck you, airlines.
Since last year, I have returned a couple of items. I also have drastically reduced shopping at Amazon. I have a lot of patience compared to some people, who abuse Amazon's return policy. That said, there is a limit to anyone's patience.
What I am trying to say is - "maybe go to different ones" might not always be possible. If you are in a hurry to get somewhere (maybe a family member is in the hospital) and a United flight is the only one available, what then? Also, other airlines are not super great either.
Maybe for some household item I can shop around at leisure, but "maybe go to different ones" is not possible all the time. Plus, shopping is tiring and irritating as it is, not everyone wants to do PhD level research for every item they buy
If/when airlines figure out how to use GenAI to gouge folks they will. Airlines were so eager to enable GenAI and gut service to save money that they rolled out easily manipulated bots and lost money.
Delta can try to increase my ticket prices by trying to identify me and raising my prices, I will be trying to use my AI agent to get a lower price.
The implied moral imperative of the airline trying to stop bad actors isn't relevant in that scenario.
Or, equivalently, lower the price for those who couldn't afford it otherwise, while still remaining profitable. As others have said here, airlines are low margin, so what it means is that everyone who pays more effectively subsidize those who pay less.
How fair it is depends on your definition of fairness. If your definition of fairness is that everyone should pay the same price for the same service, from a poor, indebted student to a billionaire, then it is unfair. If it is more about giving everyone the same opportunities, then individual pricing can be seen as fairer. The wealthy business traveller will see it as price gouging, but will fly anyways because he can afford it, but the student will be able to fly when he otherwise wouldn't be able to.
Customers using AI for their advantage, as to pay less than they can afford will change the dynamic. Instead of a system where travelers pay as much as they can afford, we get to a system where those who don't know how to use technology to their advantage subsidize those who do, which, to me, is the least fair of all.
Now, you are free to use any trick you want to pay less, in the same way that airlines are using every trick to make you pay more, that's the game, and I am certainly playing it myself. The law and regulations are the rules, and to me, it does not unfairly favor the airlines, otherwise, they would have much higher margins.
"They're not screwing you over, it's just Affirmative Action for ticket pricing."
Considering that most people here, me included are in those "privileged classes" and also at least middle class, then for most of us, affirmative action is the state screwing you over.
Now, if we had to name one company that really "screws you over" here, it is Nvidia, not the airline. They make insane margins, they are worth an insane amount of money, even after the recent crash, and they are the ones who profit on the AIs both customers and airlines use.
Specific to the airlines, they give away billions of dollars in airline miles every year. Only the people with the most money to spend get those benefits.
This is effectively corruption (a kickback) and should probably be illegal.
Here is how it works: companies pay high price tickets for their employees business travels. But the ones who get the miles are the travelers. This is an incentive for employees on a business travel to pick the ticket that gives off the most miles that they can spend on personal travels. These are usually the tickets that make the airline most of their profits.
In general the points/rebates/... are hardly a gift. These are companies giving back a share of their profits when you buy high margin items. Most of the times I look at these, they are not worth it, as in: you get $10 worth of points on a $100 purchase that you can find for $50 elsewhere.
> actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles
What could possibly go wrong, rejecting bookings from people busy enough to want help woth mundane stuff like this?
I am at a point where whenever I have to deal with any online booking website, call it support or booking, I rather spin off an agent and spare me the pain.
The added satisfaction of fighting their claw with my claw adds some degree of satisfaction to it.
It’s not only about price, but also about my own mental sanity.
It is still but you're not shopping around prices based off "you have a product, I have money". You're shopping around because "you have a product that others also sell and I will pay any one of you the least amount of money I can get away with".
> How do they plan on stopping me from using Claude code with the Claude in chrome plugin, or some other computer use agent?
I proactively answered this very question in my own comment. Initially they will try and block your chrome plugin and if they fail, then those $50 flights will just be gone from the website. More context in my own comment but this is a very reasonable question to ask.
The endgame is just to raise prices for everyone. It's not like airlines are making a ton of money. Everything affects their profits and small margins.
Imagine if you just went to their site and honestly got the best price that day / week.
I’m actually skeptical that there are loss-leader seats being sold on normal routes (eg where one airline is not trying to force another out of business). Does anybody have a source for that? I have always assumed that low prices were to extract as much value as possible from a plane on a given route.
> Do you mean stop gouging some customers based on information asymmetry? Doesn’t bother me.
No. The airline will simply 2x gouge everyone instead of the 1x now.
Maybe they won't be able to stop you, but the average Joe won't be able to cover his tracks as effectively, or most likely, Claude Code and others will by default be required to assert the browser for the current session is being operated by an agent.
> Claude Code and others will by default be required to assert the browser for the current session is being operated by an agent
How do they plan to stop you? I don't know but the punishment would be cancelling your tickets if you get caught
I have been exploring know your agent solutions and nobody can give me an honest answer.
Specifically, Karens calling customer service after the agent booked a $20k ticket in first class across the world and demanding refunds using the Bart Simpson defense (I didn't do it).
It is - these restrictions are part of the product. How you allow people to purchase your offerings is part of the business and has its own costs associated with it. How much more would you pay in order to have a LLM purchase a ticket for you?
I agree. Complaining "I have money, now give me your product!" is tantamount to "I have a product, now give me your money!"
That said, this and so many other aspects of a functional capitalist society rely on customers and corporations having roughly equal leverage over one another. But since corporations have insanely centralized bargaining power as collectives, have bent the legal system in their favor at every turn, and are consistently overprivileged by technological innovation, I have long since abandoned any social contract with them.
Chrome has this architectural problem where the webpage can see what extensions you have installed. United could just refuse to run if you have that installed.
1) they are under tremendous amount compliance boundaries, liabilities ambiguities and customer support issues, when agents go rogue or caused monetary damages to both service providers or merchants and consumers.
2) we collectively haven't figured out a way how agenic commerce would work. They have been some ideas floating around from Google, Shopify Cloudflare, but it nowhere near settled as a consensus.
3) Fraud/spam/cyber - Agents AMPLIFY these malicious interactions with their existing Human User Interface (HCI). In other words, the current HCI is not designed for agentic interactions.
For example: If your Meta Muse agent buys a $5k business class ticket from US to Europe using your Chase credit card that you find out after the fact, and you call your credit card companies for non-authorized transaction chargeback, who's responsible to the damages? Did you authorize the agent to buy tickets not?
If Chase denies your chargeback and make you liable for $5k to be paid, you pay for it or no? If you don't pay for it, United sues you in court, do you tell the judge you didn't authorize your agent to buy that ticket? Or you sue Meta instead? You see where this is going??
If HF did have any hard feelings about the event, they were likely settled with OpenAI out-of-court.
That's not settled law.
Which is why corporations like these don't want to run the risk.
Conversely, if there's a chat log of me saying "Buy a ticket to China" and then clicking "yes" on an approval prompt showing the full price, ticket dates, etc. then yeah, obviously that one is on me.
A "yes" in the chat isn't enough. The agent could misunderstand, and logs can be modified. I wanted something more reliable: an approval outside the agent, using a passkey, tied to a specific request and impossible to reuse.
It's open source: https://github.com/AndreaAcanfora/a2h-gateway. It implements A2H (Agent-to-Human), a protocol published by Twilio this year.
I think this kind of approach could make companies much more comfortable with AI agents handling purchases.
But apparently, it’s okay for that same Google to unleash bots to scrape entire websites...
No? None of these questions are difficult at all. Where do you think it's going?
But pretty much every company that's involved with payment risk assessments, identity verification, or bot detection (Forter, Incode, Akamai, etc.) now has services they're trying to sell to merchants so that they can identify agentic traffic. Time will tell how effective they are with the different varieties of automation.
Some merchants want that capability to make sure legitimately authorized AI agents don't get unduly tangled in fraud prevention systems, but others, like United it seems, will use it to try to block them outright.
By that time, the open obliterated models will have caught up and will be able to do this just as well as the current frontier models, if not better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation_(artificial_intellige...
The product-for-money part is never the problem. It's always the refunds, the chargebacks, the customer service complaints, the person filing a complaint with regulators.
A lot of the systems that relied on low levels of these situations are about to be tested by waves of agents doing everything they can to take advantage of the rules: Chargebacks, complaints, refunds, cancellations.
They need to make a best-effort demonstration that they are complying with the federal regulations.
The federal regulations require that flyers see notices about banned luggage and other requirements. The article covers this.
The thing is, they don't need to go to extremes to detect and ban everything. They can state their policy and then they have some coverage if regulators come knocking.
I would guess they're also dealing with the same problems that occur in other spaces involving reservations: AI agents tend to operate greedily and optimistically by default. A common situation in other industries is that they'll read a cancellation policy, then proactively make a reservation before asking the user if they want it. The agent will try to hold a spot and then schedule a cancellation before the window ends (example, 23 hours into a 24 hour cancellation period) and wait for the user to confirm.
As a result, the churn rate for agent-created reservations is very different than when humans do it, which breaks a lot of assumptions and financial expectations.
Unregulated spaces like restaurants can charge a non-refundable reservation fee or threaten cancellation fees (which is enough to scare off agents, for now at least) but regulated spaces like airlines may be required to process cancellations according to some rules. So now if you have agents everywhere exhibiting reservation/cancellation behavior that nobody expected and it's changing suddenly with each new update of Meta Muse or other system, it gets messy.
AI agents are a real problem for a lot of interactions that previously assumed humans were making the decisions. When an agent running 24/7 with a goal of maximizing its owners' happiness starts doing things, some of these systems break down.
So I can see multiple reasons why they'd want to officially disallow it. I would expect that making it a formal rule is enough to start getting Claude, Meta Muse, and others to add a guardrail forbidding it too.
Not going to stop the motivated individual running OpenRouter tokens and some complex local agent setup, but that's such a small number of people it can be ignored.
Perhaps Delta might have considered this when they introduced AI-driven price optimization ("what is the absolute highest we think this human will bear for this flight?"), not "Oh, we only ever assumed we'd be the ones to use AI for optimization purposes!".
The AI provlems right now are that 1. investors expect your have the AI boost, 2. competitors already use it, and cloning anything is easy now 3. customers use agentic shopping. This thread is about no 3, but a company that does nothing AI still finds itself dealing with all of them. It's a new world.
Now sure you could bypass this by running your own harness/tooling, but then you'd be in breach of laws. There's various policies like this today around web scraping
Airlines and other companies are faced with a choice: Let everything go to shit for people who don't use AI agents, or start discouraging the use of AI agents. It will be interesting to see whether companies embrace anti-AI AI agents or try to weight the penalties such that deterrence is achieved without them. e.g. Would you continue using an AI agent to book flights if you faced a potential lifetime ban from that airline?
It works both ways. If they can use AI to charge me more, I should be able to use AI to save a few dollars.
If you’re actually arguing they should set a fair, stable price and I should pay it, then I agree. But that shipped sailed decades ago.
Can you though? How would you even know? All I know is airline pricing has been a bit of a blackbox for as long as I've been a buyer of the tickets. Even if they aren't using AI, they're still playing games. And if they're games are such that using an AI on the buyer side, that's what people will use.
And to be clear, I have no desire to use AI to buy my tickets, certainly not the "buy now, refund tomorrow, buy again, repeat until flight time" stuff proposed in comments. I just want a ticket at a fair price, which to me basically means "roughly the same price the guy next to me paid"
I share your hatred for all the stupid ways people are outsourcing their thinking to linear algebra. But isn't this problem self-solving? Airlines will figure out how to identify AI-purchased tickets, and if a significant fraction of them aren't actually flown, they'll adjust their overbooking setup.
Meanwhile, the AI maximalists are having their wallet drained. Always a fan of that.
(know folks inside United, but not speaking in any way for the company, I just know how the process works, as a curious security person)
Just like other companies that have similar low alternative services. They let you do it. They log and flag and as soon as you have a problem, instead of working to solve it, they see you are on the flagged list and you are now banned from the service. People who find themselves banned from an airline when they miss a connection or report lost luggage have done some other activity that got them to be flagged as a potential unwanted customer.
they just don't want the possible liability of dealing with whatever legalities that might occur from autonomous agent usage. and i can't really blame em for that.
You see how it's unfair when you do it... right?
They will change when a significant portion of booking are happening via agents, and they would be missing out if they didn't change.
The righteous Claude would refuse to book on that airline. It already refuses to search amazon.com.
But I agree that at that point I'll just change the agent, or use local model that is less principled.
They don’t.
When a dispute that either party(you or United airlines in this theoretical case) decides to litigate an argument far enough that it becomes clear you used an AI agent like Claude then you are going to run afoul of the CFAA[1] and are going to get fucked legally because they stated who could access their site and you violated it with your agents against their stated will.
This is a legal ward, not a technical one. Violate it at your own peril.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
But if you are violating their terms for access then you still violated their terms for access. Then its up to a court to decide if a case it brought forth.
The user also has more fine grained permission over the interaction. They could choose to give permissions just to read account details or flight info or to actually make a purchase. United knows it's an agent acting.
Of course, unbehaved agents will still go around, but by providing a golden path, the better behaved ones will be better citizens.
The alternative is, as parent comment suggests, a user can allow Claude to drive their browser. Then, apart from heuristics, United Airlines can't really tell the difference between Claude driving the browser and a user driving the browser. Therefore you have less granular permissions and more unbounded actions and risk. There is no way to audit what is done by a human being versus by an agent. And United Airlines still has agents interacting with their site.
Isn't that was ITA Matrix [1] is?
[1] https://matrix.itasoftware.com/search
They don't have to. The policy itself allows them to take consequential actions to address various issues in this regard.
Why is this? If you go look at the financial statements of airlines (for which Airlines for America is the industry trade group), you will understand that a large portion of their profits come from monetizing human friction and attention.
Imagine things like upsells for their branded credit cards, feeding into the points game, etc. These are all things that appeal to humans, but that agents are almost certainly going to skip and then relentlessly price-compare the flight at the end of the funnel.
Now, once Amazon’s appeal was denied by the court, it became obvious that they needed to resort to technical solutions if they could not block it by trying to leverage the CFAA. Therefore, these industries are now implementing technical solutions.
Ultimately, personal agents are a huge consumer benefit, but they challenge the business models underlying much of the internet. I expect to see more of this kind of behavior from incumbents, which ironically leaves them vulnerable to disruption by players who do support agents, as this market shift plays out.
It is possible to detect Claude controlling your Chrome browser, as well as many computer use agents. Give this a try: https://demo.switchfrog.com. Ultimately though the mainstream agents will (and mostly already do) self-identify and businesses will adapt.
Source: I am the founder of a company in the space, Switchfrog.
This is going to be an interesting arms race.
> I prefer and will do my best to avoid detection or blocking
Looks like saga about exporting GPU to China :)
Ideally the wish to not have your service accessed by automation should also be legally enforceable. And we need clear precident that users and operators of automation are 100% liable for the damages they cause.
Surely the airline company makes money with the actual flight... but also they might start to make money with selling private data. Maybe they even start to make MORE money due to a commission on car rental, hotel, tourist attraction, etc than the actual flight.
The "product", due to pressure from competition, enshittification, novel alternatives, is changing and we as customers don't necessarily notice it. In fact the company is probably doing its very best so that we don't and can thus benefit with side effects that we are not aware of, otherwise we would ask for compensation.
So... I'm not justifying the practice but also business wise, it makes sense that they try to keep control of everything around their product.
Must see by Wendover Productions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
So while it’s not an impenetrable barrier, it will almost completely solve the problem they’re trying to.
Mostly for offline services not otherwise accessible to agents (e.g. things requiring physical presence), but also for things where providers are get sufficiently aggressive at blocking that it's cheaper to provide an API to request a human to do something than playing cat and mouse with blocking attempts.
Mostly - beyond fringe services - for a short time because most of the gaps people are willing to pay for will be closed by proper automation pretty quickly.
It's a subscription service to be alerted to cheap flights from your airport(s) of choice.
Essentially a few people scan Google Flights every day looking for flights that are priced abnormally low; if they find something, they send out alerts.
Technically, this is made worse by the human in the loop. A computer program could analyze this data more quickly, more accurately, etc.
Legally, it would be against Google's terms of service for Google Flights to do this programmatically. So there are some people just running essentially the same searches every day.
And Going even credits which employee found each deal (I suspect to make it very clear that there is a human in the loop and they are not violating Google's TOS).
But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of this sort of thing.