Comment by mejutoco
18 hours ago
Any website could in theory provide api access. But websites do not want this in general: remember google search api? Agents will run into similar restrictions for some cases as apis. It is not a technical problem imo, but an incentives one.
The rules have changed though. They blocked api access because it helped competitors more than end users. With claws, end users are going to be the ones demanding it.
I think it means front-end will be a dead end in a year or two.
My point is that the underlying incentives are exactly the same. I dont think the rules have changed at all. If you are expedia you could always give an api to search forhotels, but why commoditize yourself? Same with agents.
Ryanair recently had a court case with some meta travel website because they were selling their flights. Ryanair wants to sell you the insurance and extras, and they can only do so controlling the experience.
My prediction is, like apis, there will be some years of extra access for agents, followed by locking moats for their own experience.
”End users” currently being people spending hundreds/thousands of dollars to set up custom brittle workflows, a whole total of a few thousands globally. Let’s not make this into something it’s not, personally I lost all trust in karpathy with his hyping of Clawdbot as som sci-fi future when all it was were people prompting LLMs to go write Reddit posts.
Can you explain how Google Search API fits into your point? I don't know enough about it
If I want to use google search in an automated way google does not want it. They prefer to show me ads. This applies to apis or agents. If google does not want that they will add friction by removing api access or making it difficult to use agents (fingerprinting, 2fa, captchas, etc)