Amazon, Delta and major banks are blocking AI agents from their sites

As of October 2026, people using AI agents including Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots and Instinct say the tools are being stopped from completing tasks on leading websites. Agents built to book tables, tidy inboxes or buy products on a user's behalf are hitting access barriers on a growing list of platforms.

Yelp said it only admits agents that pay into its data licensing program. Delta Air Lines is preventing agents from purchasing tickets for users, while JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab confirmed they block agents from accounts over security concerns. Some users add that Cars.com and Amtrak, which previously worked with their agents, are no longer reachable, hinting that other firms may be restricting access without announcing it.

The Amazon–Perplexity fight continues

Amazon banned Perplexity's agentic shopping feature in 2025 and sued the startup. Perplexity argued that Amazon fears losing human visitors who see its ads, and described its agent as an extension of the user. A judge ordered Perplexity to stop its agents shopping on Amazon, but an appeals court reversed that ruling in August 2026, after which Amazon filed an amended complaint. Amazon has since said Muse's continued access breaches its site policies, and there are reports that Grok, Dots and Instinct's agent cannot use Amazon either. xAI owner Elon Musk suggested he might start a rival to Amazon.

Meta pushed back in an October 2026 post. "Turning away a personal agent means turning away the customer behind it," the company said. Rather than confront Amazon, Meta has signed up retailers such as Walmart, Gap, Sephora and Best Buy to let Muse shop on their sites, and Shopify has opened its storefront network to AI agents. Instinct declined to comment; OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond.

Anti-bot defenses add friction

Even where agents are not banned, widespread anti-bot tools are tripping them up. Posts on Reddit say Google has blocked some Muse-linked accounts for suspicious activity, and some users report checkout failures on Walmart despite its Meta deal. Cloudflare, which launched a one-click block for AI crawlers in 2025, also began blocking crawlers that harvest content for both search indexing and AI training.

Chris Canal, CEO of AI safety evaluator EquiStamp, said the barriers clearly dent the perceived value of companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, since agents can do fewer useful things. He also warned that as more sites deploy human-verification checks, the web could become more tedious for everyone, even on simple grocery sites.