# The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10711 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10711/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 24 of its 124 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12516/) (2025)
- [An Illusion of Progress? Assessing the Current State of Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01382/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14143/) (2025)
- [Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14499/) (2025)
- [Holistic Agent Leaderboard: The Missing Infrastructure for AI Agent Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11977/) (2025)
- [Authenticated Delegation and Authorized AI Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.09674/) (2025)
- [Towards a Science of AI Agent Reliability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16666/) (2026)
- [Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14933/) (2024)
- [A Scalable Communication Protocol for Networks of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11905/) (2024)
- [Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02649/) (2025)
- [The 2025 AI Agent Index: Documenting Technical and Safety Features of Deployed Agentic AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17753/) (2026)
- [IDs for AI Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12137/) (2024)
- [The AI Agent Index](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01635/) (2025)
- [The Automated but Risky Game: Modeling and Benchmarking Agent-to-Agent Negotiations and Transactions in Consumer Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00073/) (2025)
- [Legal Alignment for Safe and Ethical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04175/) (2026)
- [Designing Fiduciary Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02435/) (2023)
- [Somesite I Used To Crawl: Awareness, Agency and Efficacy in Protecting Content Creators From AI Crawlers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15091/) (2024)
- [Frontier AI Ethics: Anticipating and Evaluating the Societal Impacts of Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06750/) (2024)
- [Permission Manifests for Web Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02371/) (2025)
- [LLM Agents Are the Antidote to Walled Gardens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23978/) (2025)
- [Machine-Readable Ads: Accessibility and Trust Patterns for AI Web Agents interacting with Online Advertisements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12844/) (2025)
- [The Attribution Crisis in LLM Search Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.00838/) (2025)
- [Agentic Inequality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16853/) (2025)
- [Lecture II: Communicative Justice and the Distribution of Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20718/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The agentic web, in which users interact with the internet largely through agents acting on their behalf, is now technically feasible. However, many of the consumer and social benefits that could be realized by online AI agents acting scrupulously in their principals' interest are currently obstructed by outdated laws, terms of service, and other less formal practices which allow online platforms to block and degrade agent access, often in secret. Few distinctions are currently drawn between "malicious bots" and AI agents acting with the express delegated authority of a user. For the agentic web to realize its promise, it needs not only the technical infrastructure of protocols and interfaces, but the normative infrastructure of a broadly-accepted and socially-beneficial set of laws, norms and practices governing agentic access to online properties. Building that normative infrastructure requires a society-wide conversation. This paper aims to help precipitate that conversation, to identify normative principles that can guide it, and to advocate for policies that enable users' appropriately delegated agents to act online on their behalf, with as few curbs on their doing so as is reasonable given the other legitimate interests at stake.