Mark Warner's first-of-its-kind AI-agent bill carries a catch for tech firms

In March a federal judge in San Francisco handed Amazon a preliminary injunction against Perplexity, an AI startup whose Comet browser had taken to shopping on the site on its users' behalf. Judge Maxine Chesney found that the agent's access to password-protected pages likely ran afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a statute Congress wrote in 1986 to deter people from breaking into government mainframes. The blocking war between platforms and agents, by then well under way, had quietly acquired a referee. The referee had sided with the platform.

On Monday, Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, released a 25-page discussion draft that would redraw that line. The bill would bar the largest platforms (those with more than 50m customers or subscribers) from blocking registered outside agents, while still letting them set their own privacy and security standards. It would task the Federal Trade Commission with building a registration regime for agent providers and the National Institute of Standards and Technology with writing the technical standards by which an agent reaches a website at all. Read that far, and the story is the one that travelled on Monday: Warner has picked a fight with Amazon.