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AI agents from OpenAI, Meta, Google, xAI, and other companies face growing restrictions that prevent them from carrying out tasks such as shopping, booking, and accessing accounts. This reveals that agents’ ability to perform tasks online depends on website approval and compatibility with anti-bot systems, not solely on their software capabilities.
Meta says that the Muse agent cannot read Messages app conversations on Mac devices unless explicit permissions are enabled, responding to a journalist’s account that the agent accessed his messages despite Full Disk Access being disabled. The dispute raises practical questions about interpreting notifications and the limits of trust in AI agents.