The agentic web arrives as Muse and OpenAI's Dots scale

The agentic web is a second transformation of the internet, following the mobile web that arrived with the iPhone in 2007 and the App Store a year later. Just as the mobile web did not replace the browser-based web but changed it — some businesses faltered and some media, such as online Flash games, disappeared — the agentic web is expected to reshape rather than erase the human web. The parallel carries a warning: platforms like Reddit made their mobile pages practically unusable to force app downloads, and services such as Signal, Hinge, and WeChat require a phone at all.

A central tension in the piece is between two ways of building for agents. One trains agents to use browsers like humans; the other gives agents text-and-code interfaces, such as the plug-ins and connectors found in Claude, ChatGPT, and Muse. Connectors can act as safety layers — Stripe's Link keeps card details from the agent and requires human confirmation — but a full-featured agentic web does not yet exist. Meanwhile, computer-use agents have improved: OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, released last September, achieved a 73% success rate on OSWorld 2.0, a benchmark for multistep tasks in software such as Slack and Excel.

The economics of control may decide the outcome. The history of the web has been a story of consolidation, and that may be the default path here too: when OpenClaw, the first popular personal assistant agent, exploded onto the scene in early 2026, OpenAI quickly snapped up its creator, Peter Steinberger. Closed environments are easier to keep safe, as Microsoft economist David Rothschild notes, but they also create less growth and less equitable growth. Some experts, such as Wellesley's Eni Mustafaraj and Mozilla's Ajit Varma, hope agents will free users from algorithms and intermediaries like Amazon and DoorDash; others, including Wharton's Ethan Mollick, warn that the human internet could be abandoned entirely for private spaces.