Jeeves and the Little Army
I don’t know if you have ever been what the papers call a heavy user of artificial intelligence, but I have, and it comes at you rather like a spaniel: all enthusiasm, and you find yourself carrying the thing.
The occasion was Aunt Dahlia, who was on the wire at nine wanting facts about a box that keeps burglars off the telephone wire, for a piece in Milady’s Boudoir. What it sold on Amazon, how many people had its app, and above all what the reviews on Reddit said, Reddit being, as she put it, “where people tell the truth because nobody is looking.”
I have, these days, what I think of as my little army of agents. You give them the brief and off they go, and you sit back with the tissue restorer. I gave them the brief. I sat back.
A good many of them came back with nothing whatever.
“Jeeves,” I said.
“Sir?”
“The army has returned, and most of it empty-handed. Not so much as a hat. What do you make of this?”
He cast an eye over the wreckage. The left eyebrow flickered, which in Jeeves does duty for a stunned exclamation.
“Amazon appears to have returned a 503, sir, which is to say it declined to receive the caller. A help centre and two of the companies that deal in other companies’ financials have each answered with a 403. And Reddit, sir, now refuses all callers who have not signed an agreement with it.”
“Dash it, Jeeves, they were only asking for a few facts.”
“Quite so, sir. If I might suggest a remedy. The difficulty is not one of intelligence but of appearance. Were you to send the same agent out again through your own browser, by way of one of those MCP servers, it would carry your cookies, your home address on the wire, and what one might call your accumulated respectability. It would not look like a stranger. It would look like you.”
I never argue with Jeeves on a matter of technique. The thing went out through my Chrome and came back in a few minutes with the lot. Same agent, same questions. The only difference was that the second time it looked like me.
“Jeeves, it worked. But I say, it’s a frightful lot of work for a few facts. Opening a browser, taking pictures of the screen, reading the pictures. Everybody is using these agents now, to look things up and to act for them, and yet the agents are barred from the very places one wants them to go. Surely there’s a better way?”
“One would hope so, sir. Even if there is no solution today, it seems unlikely to remain the position two years hence.”
“Then who’s in the best spot to fix it? And how are they going about it?”
Jeeves has a way of looking, when asked a question of this sort, like a man who has already read the answer in the morning paper and is only waiting for you to catch up.
“The establishments are not opposed to artificial intelligence, sir. They are opposed to callers they do not recognise. From the doorstep, your agent and a laboratory’s training crawler are indistinguishable: an address in some datacentre, no history, and requests arriving at a pace no human hand produces. Unable to tell the two apart, the establishment refuses both. Nor can one blame them. Cloudflare’s report in July finds that more than half of the traffic it sees is now not human at all, and that more than half of the crawlers are collecting material to train models. A caller that removes the contents and sends nobody back to look at the advertisements is not so much a visitor, sir, as a removals van.”
“So they shoot at the uniform.”
“Precisely, sir. The large assistants, you will notice, do not suffer from this. Meta’s fetcher, OpenAI’s, Google’s: each gives its name at the door, meta-externalfetcher, ChatGPT-User and so forth, arrives from published addresses, and appears on the lists of recognised callers that Cloudflare and the other establishments keep. Meta’s callers have been admitted for fifteen years, since that is how a link comes to carry a picture. Meta’s own documentation states that its fetcher may disregard a site’s instructions where a user has asked for the page. There is, in short, a way in, sir. It is merely that only a handful of houses are permitted to write their own pass.”
“And who’s to write one for the rest of us?”
“Cloudflare, sir, is best placed. It stands in front of roughly a quarter of the world’s websites, so it is already the porter, and it has been busy. A means for a caller to sign its requests and so prove its identity, called Web Bot Auth. A register of signed agents. A service called Pay Per Crawl, which answers a caller with a price and the status code 402, and now a payments arrangement on a protocol called x402, so that an agent may pay a fraction of a penny for a page. And from the fifteenth of September, sir, its standing rule for new premises carrying advertisements is to refuse agent callers unless the proprietor admits them or is paid. Cloudflare decides who comes in, and Cloudflare collects the money.”
“Jeeves, that’s not a porter. That’s a racket.”
“It is a position of some strength, sir. The other house to watch is Meta. On the eighth of September it launched Muse, a personal agent that lives in a browser in Meta’s cloud and books, buys and fills in forms on one’s behalf. It will meet the same doormen your army met, sir, unless Meta comes to terms with them. Meta does, however, have upwards of two hundred million businesses inside WhatsApp, by its own count of some years ago, for whom a website need never be visited at all. A great many bookings will simply happen there.”
“So where does it end?”
“It will be interesting, sir, to see which of the houses settles it. Cloudflare has the position and Meta has the customers. What no one has yet built is the piece in the middle: proof of which person a given agent is working for, and who is to answer when it gets something wrong.”
I brooded on this. It seemed to me a rummy state of affairs, and I said so.
“Very rummy, sir.”
“Well, if any of you fellows have views on how this is going to shake out, drop me a line. Jeeves, the mauve tie.”
“I had hoped, sir, that we had agreed the mauve tie was to go to the deserving poor.”
“A fellow whose army has just been turned away at the gate is entitled to a tie.”
“Very good, sir.”