Delta, Chase and Amazon are blocking AI agents
Greg Isenberg maps nine stages of the fight, from blocking to paying to be your agent's first recommendation.
Greg Isenberg says Delta, Chase and Amazon are blocking AI agents, and he laid out nine stages of how the fight plays out from here.
selling to agents becomes as normal as having a website
The list that set it off came from @trikcode, who noted that Delta is blocking AI agents from booking flights, that JPMorgan Chase and Charles Schwab block agents from accessing accounts, that Yelp requires paid data licensing for agents, and that Amazon has blocked Grok bot and other shopping agents. His read is blunt. The internet is starting to block the agents that were supposed to do everything for us.
The nine stages
Isenberg's version starts where we are now. Companies block agents because agents skip the ads and upsells. Then agents learn to act like humans and it becomes an arms race. Then the market splits three ways, with companies that make money on sales letting agents in, companies that make money on data charging for access, and the giants building their own agents.
From there he expects a trusted middle layer for agent identity and payments to become the standard way in, and companies that welcome agents to start taking customers from the ones that block them. The blockers come back on their own terms. Then everyone competes for agents with better prices, faster checkout and SEO built for agents. Then the ads come back, and companies pay to be your agent's first recommendation. Stage nine is the boring one, where selling to agents is as normal as having a website.
Why a publisher is already rebuilding around it
Dan Shipper is running the same logic on the distribution side. He says the newsletter is dead, and he does not say it lightly, because Every's core business is a newsletter with more than 120,000 subscribers. His reason is that persistent agents filter his inbox for him, so he almost never looks at it unless there is something specific to reply to.
His conclusion is the part that should land for anyone whose growth plan is an email list. Getting someone's email no longer guarantees a relationship. Instead of fighting for an address, he thinks publishers and creators need to be installed in the reader's agent harness so they get notified directly when something new ships. Every is already testing this with its MCP and frontier alerts to users of its Slack agent.
This is a prediction, not a result, and Isenberg's nine stages are his map rather than anyone's roadmap. But it rhymes with his earlier point that anything built around humans clicking gets rethought. If the buyer becomes an agent, whether your product is reachable by one stops being a technical footnote and becomes a distribution decision.
the idea of getting someone's email creating a direct relationship with them is over
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