I think this is why the LLM era will not produce as much automation as people think.

We have had the ability to automate browser activities for a long time—but, online service providers don’t want to be behind a layer of automation, which is why captchas were invented.

Automating things on the Internet has never been a technology obstacle, it has been a social one.

I don’t see how anything has changed!

In fact I recently received an updated ToS from eBay saying I am not allowed to use an AI agent to buy stuff on their site. Just a matter of time until others follow suit!

Edit: I misunderstood what was happening. Thanks to the comment below for clarifying.

While I agree with you, thats not what this announcement is about. Anthropic wants to disallow programmatic use of their subscription plans for business reasons as a way to manage demand. They’re having outages, at least weekly, since March.