United is the first airline to ban bookings from Meta’s AI agent, Muse: 'I don't want to create another middleman'

Exhibit A is United Airlines [NASDAQ:UAL], which has taken an aggressive stance against third-party AI agents, banning them from their digital platforms and also stopping their use with airline-linked travel agencies and associated aggregators. Meta’s Muse agent and OpenAI’s Dots are examples of the agents United is blocking.

“Sharing account credentials with personal, third-party, AI assistants can expose sensitive information, and actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles,” the airline said in a Nov. 11 statement. “Plus, these automated AI actions have the potential to violate [Federal Aviation Administration] and [Department of Transportation] regulations - as an example, flight check-in requires human acknowledgment that bags do not contain banned substances like explosives.”

The ban covers “unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants” and “includes updates to our booking, ticketing and distribution policies,” United stated.

While agentic AI consumer commercial use is in its infancy, United seems to be taking no chances. On Nov. 10, company CEO Scott Kirby said that while agentic AI has big potential, it needs to be policed for commercial and consumer privacy reasons.

“To be honest, I don’t want to create another middleman,” Kirby noted, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Weighing the risks and rewards of AI agents

CEOs evaluating the intervention of third-party AI agents working on behalf of customers have a tough choice to make, consumer commerce experts say.

“Both things are true,” Boris Kreiman, founder and CEO of Boca Raton, Florida.-based Linkbaits, an AI agent technology builder, told Moneywise. “The security concerns are legitimate: an AI agent holding your MileagePlus credentials can buy tickets and drain miles, and a rogue agent at booking scale could create real liability. But the ban also conveniently protects United’s direct-booking economics.”

For the C-suite execs tasked with managing or banning third-party AI agents, the tell will be whether companies like United build a secure, official way for verified AI assistants to access fares. Without that, attempts to ban “unauthorized” AI agents risk banning all of them, Kreiman said.

Kreiman noted that banks faced the same question with fintech apps and solved it with tokenized access, per-transaction approval, and spend limits instead of blanket bans. “An agent that can search fares but needs a tap to purchase is far safer than a customer pasting credentials into a sketchy aggregator, which is what bans push people toward,” he added.

Protecting revenue streams is a priority for businesses

Other digital market experts say that while consumer privacy concerns are valid, airlines and other consumer commercial enterprises may have ulterior reasons for walling off AI consumer-serving bots.

“There’s another point here that is not getting much attention,” Jeff Wixted, product management leading the Travel and New Verticals at Signifyd, a fraud protection technology firm, told Moneywise. “Airlines generate the bulk of their profits from co-branded credit cards. For example, American Express will pay Delta about $9 billion this year. They don’t want to cut off that revenue stream through an AI agent where they can’t market and upsell the buyer on a credit card.”

Wixted says, for that reason alone, payment networks like Amex need to step in and manage the AI consumer bot experience. “They have a vested interest in developing a standard agent protocol, particularly to help verify the intent of a purchase,” he noted.

Airlines may also be concerned about customer disputes. “While travelers have a 24-hour grace period to cancel, a high volume of cancellations could overwhelm airlines and, more importantly, disrupt their inventory,” Wixted said. “If an airline can’t resell a seat to a business traveler at a higher price and margin, that becomes a real issue. Having a large number of AI agents holding inventory could create a very big problem for airlines.

The future for AI consumer agents

Kreiman believes AI agents are here to stay and airlines will need to learn to work with them.

If they do it in a secure way, they’ll capture the demand. Otherwise, they will “play whack-a-mole against scrapers while teaching customers to book elsewhere,” Kreiman said. “From experience building agents: blanket blocks mostly stop the legitimate operators. Bad actors just route around them.”