AI agents flood the internet as platforms enter 'no man's land'
A commentary published by Huxiu's Token Moment argues that as personal AI assistants such as Muse, Instinct, Grok Bot, WeChat Xiaowei and Cue proliferate, users are handing search, browsing, price comparison, ordering and payment to AI agents — while Amazon moved to block Muse's access and Apple tightened system permissions for AI agents, exposing a conflict between platforms and agents. The piece cites Cloudflare data putting AI traffic at 57.5% versus 42.5% for humans, a16z figures saying agent token consumption runs about 5x human usage and grew 14x in six months, and Alipay saying AI payment transactions passed 300 million. The author concludes the internet's next phase shifts from competing for human attention to competing for AI agent entry points, requiring platforms to serve both human-facing front ends and agent-callable back ends.
If AI agents become the internet's main operators, platform interfaces, advertising models and business workflows may all need redesigning around them.