Today · viral post, October 17 to 18

Amazon and JPMorgan curb AI agents; no report gives a count

A viral list says the internet is starting to block AI agents; of the five companies it names, three check out

Concept illustration in two side-by-side panels: on the left, an upright black-framed smartphone on a black stand shows a grey circle and grey line at the top of its screen above a beige facade with five dark openings (three above, two below), each crossed by a red bar, and in front of them a black laptop lettered AI AGENT sits on a black wheeled cart beside a speech bubble of grey lines. On the right, three storefronts stand side by side on pale paving, with signs lettered amazon (an orange curved arrow beneath it), JPMORGAN (beside a blue geometric symbol) and YELP (beside a red starburst symbol); a red bar crosses each dark doorway, a small grey box on a post stands beside the YELP doorway, and in the foreground a larger black laptop, also lettered AI AGENT, sits on a wheeled cart with a grey-lined speech bubble above it.

Why it matters: Amazon's block targets Meta's agent placing orders for shoppers, and JPMorgan's CEO bars outside agents without saying which actions. Blocking so far is company by company. No report found for this issue counts how many agents are blocked, so the viral claim that "the internet is starting to block AI agents" goes beyond the evidence.

The October 18 issue reported, from relayed accounts, that three big US banks were restricting AI agents from logging into online banking. What is new today is a company-by-company check of a viral list. On the evening of October 17 the X account @trikcode posted that "the internet is starting to block AI agents" and named five companies (@trikcode, 2026-10-17).

Amazon checks out. The agent being blocked is Muse, Meta's shopping agent. According to Bloomberg, Amazon has blocked Muse since the evening of September 20 and says apps that order on a customer's behalf "should operate openly" (Bloomberg via The Star, 2026-09-22). The list also says xAI's Grok is blocked. Amazon hasn't confirmed that.

At JPMorgan, CEO Jamie Dimon said on the earnings call that JPMorgan won't let outside agents roam inside the bank: "that's just too risky" (Fortune, 2026-10-15).

Yelp's entry also checks out. TechCrunch reports that Yelp keeps non-human traffic off its site unless the agent pays to license the content (TechCrunch, 2026-10-06). Delta's own words are different: Delta has no partnership yet that lets third-party agents book for customers and is still evaluating. Delta announced no block (TechCrunch, 2026-10-06).

The list's fifth company is Schwab. Only a summary of the Schwab report was found for this issue, and the original hasn't been checked, so Schwab isn't counted as holding.

Not proven yet: none of the reports found for this issue gives a count of blocked agents How we checked →

Judgment update: The October 18 issue's call: the near-term bottleneck for agents paying on users' behalf is who controls the payment channel, not model ability. In that issue the bank item rested only on relays. Dimon's own words now cover JPMorgan. Citi and Bank of America still rest on relays, so the call is still being tested. Our read: the first agents to complete transactions will be the companies' own agents or paid licensing channels. Amazon is blocking a rival's agent, and Yelp lets agents in only if they pay. If a major bank or retailer lets outside agents log in and place orders for users, that read changes.

Martin Casado, a general partner at the venture firm a16z, calls this "part of the adoption cycle" and expects companies to adapt or be replaced (Martin Casado, 2026-10-18). a16z invests in agent startups, and Casado attached no data.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 19, 2026, alongside 9 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Amazon and JPMorgan curb AI agents; no report gives a count." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-19-1/. Accessed access date.