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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallAI agents and other automated systems are changing how the web is used, including how some sites are navigated and transactions are attempted. Security vendors have also documented malicious automation and AI-enabled cyber activity. But the available measurements do not show that the internet as a whole has “lost its humanity”: they track activity in particular datasets, not the human or cultural character of the entire web.
What is the agentic internet?
The “agentic internet” describes a web increasingly accessed not just by people reading pages or by crawlers collecting information, but by AI systems that can pursue multi-step tasks. In its 2026 State of AI Traffic and Cyberthreat Benchmark, HUMAN distinguishes training crawlers, real-time scrapers, and agentic AI. It defines agentic AI as systems that plan, decide, and act autonomously across tasks.
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That distinction matters because an agent may do more than fetch public content. HUMAN describes agents navigating pages, filling forms, and carrying out transactions. Those actions can be useful when delegated by a person, but they also make account, authentication, and checkout functions consequential targets for abuse. HUMAN’s observations come from its own customer dataset, not a census of all web activity.
What the traffic figures do—and do not—show
HUMAN says its Human Defense Platform processed more than one quadrillion interactions in 2025 across its customer base. In that observed traffic, AI-driven monthly traffic rose 187% from January to December 2025. Agentic AI traffic rose 7,851% over the same period, but remained a small part of the AI-driven category: HUMAN says it accounted for 1.7% of observed AI-driven traffic in December 2025. A very high growth rate from a small starting category does not mean agents made up a comparable share of all internet use.
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Other vendor figures point to the same need for careful scope. DataDome reported that malicious automated traffic in its customer dataset increased 124% between July 2025 and June 2026. Its release also described testing more than 20,000 websites and analyzing over one trillion requests. Separately, a 2026 Thales report landing page estimated that bots accounted for 53% of web traffic in 2025. That is a vendor-reported estimate, not a settled census of the entire internet. These figures use different samples, time periods, and definitions; they cannot be combined into one global rate.
When automation is useful—and when it becomes abuse
Automation is not synonymous with malicious activity. It can support legitimate discovery, accessibility, or tasks a person has explicitly delegated. The same broad capabilities can also be used for scraping, fraud, or account abuse. HUMAN reported that benign and malicious automation rates in its observed interactions differed by only half a percentage point, underscoring how difficult it can be to classify activity by automation alone.
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As DataDome’s VP of Threat Research Jerome Segura put it in the company’s September 22, 2026 report release: “For businesses, the challenge is no longer simply identifying automation; it is determining whether that activity is beneficial or harmful.” The practical question is therefore not just whether a request came from a bot or agent, but what it is doing, what permission it has, and what the consequences of allowing or blocking it would be.
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AI-enabled misuse is documented, but one study should not be mistaken for a prevalence estimate. Anthropic analyzed 832 accounts associated with malicious activity from March 2025 to March 2026. The accounts were selected from those it investigated and banned, and included only cases where it had enough information to map techniques. The report describes autonomous chaining of attack stages as a concern; it does not establish how common that activity is across all platforms or actors.
Together, these reports support a bounded conclusion: automated traffic and agentic interaction are growing in the datasets vendors observe, and security researchers have documented harmful uses of AI-enabled systems. They do not establish that most automation is malicious, that agents have taken over the web, or that the internet as a whole has become less human.
How to assess an agent or bot on your site
For site operators, a declared identity can help, but it is not enough to establish intent. Assess behavior and risk in context, especially before granting access to sensitive actions.
- Check what it does. Distinguish requests for public content from navigation into accounts, authentication flows, or payment steps.
- Match access to purpose. Consider whether the activity fits legitimate discovery, accessibility, or a task delegated by a user—or instead resembles scraping, fraud, or account abuse.
- Look for visibility and auditability. Prefer interactions whose identity, actions, and authorization can be reviewed, particularly when an agent can change account data or initiate a transaction.
- Weigh the cost of each decision. Blocking all automation risks excluding useful activity; allowing it without regard to behavior can expose accounts and transactions to abuse.
The cited reports explain why these checks matter, but they do not provide an independent comparative test of specific security products or a universal rule for classifying every agent. Decisions need to reflect a site’s functions, risks, and acceptable levels of access.
Has the internet lost its humanity?
That phrase works as an interpretation of a changing experience, not as a measured finding. The vendor reports count or classify interactions and traffic in defined datasets, while Anthropic’s study examines selected accounts it investigated and banned. None measures whether the web has become less human in a social or cultural sense. The evidence supports concern about the scale and capabilities of automation—and careful scrutiny of who or what is taking consequential actions—but not a claim that humanity has disappeared from the internet.
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