United Airlines bars AI agents from booking its flights

United gives two reasons. It says giving an assistant your login puts personal data at risk and can end in miles spent, account details changed or tickets bought without the customer meaning to. United also says such automated actions could breach FAA and DOT rules, since check-in needs the passenger to confirm that no explosives or other banned items are in the bags, CBS News reports.

The revised contract of carriage, the airline’s terms of sale, adds the ban as rule 6.J.6 and covers agents even when the traveller supervises them; rule 5.H lets United cancel bookings they make, View from the Wing found. Agents may still show United flights, The Verge notes, naming Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots. Chief executive Scott Kirby was blunter at an event on Tuesday: “To be honest, I don’t want to create another middleman.”

Advertising has gone the other way: Meta’s Ads MCP setup page (MCP is the connector standard that lets an AI assistant work inside another app), which we read on 26 September, lists ChatGPT and Claude among four agents it supports for running ad accounts, as our Claude for Meta ads guide covers.

Because Muse or Dots can still show a United flight but cannot buy it, a traveller who finds one through an agent has to finish the purchase themselves, on United’s own app or site or through a human-run agency, which keeps the AI middleman Kirby says he does not want out of the sale.