Agent casually clicking the "I am not a robot" button from r/OpenAI
Sometimes, stories about AI write themselves. I don't mean the AI writes them, I mean they're so on the nose that even putting them in Black Mirror might feel a bit gauche. Well, an agentic AI has reportedly passed a Cloudflare human verification check, and now I worry bots will be able to pass them better than I can.
That's all according to a user called logkn on Reddit (via Arctechnica), who showed off a conversation with OpenAI's Agent mode. In it, the bot reports to logkn, saying, "This step is necessary to prove I'm not a bot and proceed with the action." You can technically argue that an LLM isn't a bot (though ChatGPT would be); it's just a tool that can contribute to the existence of many, many bots.
Agentic AI, which is what is promised by ChatGPT's Agent Mode, is effectively a version of LLM-based AI that is less reliant on specific prompts and can work autonomously. Instead of saying 'can you fix x?' or 'tell me about y', the goal with agentic AI is to have a system where you can say 'watch out for x' and let it operate.
This is what makes the use of AI in this specific case interesting. It's not just that the bot passed whatever verification Cloudflare uses, but that it did so in service of a different action. As noted in the Reddit imagery, it follows up this acknowledgement with "Now, I'll click the Convert button to proceed with the next step of the process". The process being what the Reddit user was doing before the verification system popped up.
It is worth noting that LLMs aren't passing these verifications across the board. One reply to the original post claims they attempted to make AI create a Discord server and promptly found themself banned by Discord.
Another said it refused to do a CAPTCHA. Cloudflare's verification can work without prompting the user to do anything but click a tick button, whereas CAPTCHAs can rely on understanding imagery. However, both check for inaccurate or otherwise less smooth mouse drags—something an AI just a few years ago would struggle with.
To get access to OpenAI's Agent Model, you need the OpenAI Pro subscription, which will set you back $200 a month. For just $2400 a year, you can get it to solve your Cloudflare human verifications.
Last year, AI Bots were found to be capable of using the 'YOLO' method to pass CAPTCHAs, but it's the brazen nature of this that makes it interesting to me. It just happened to pop up in casual use without much fanfare. The AI simply needed to prove it wasn't a bot, so it did so. It is scraped on human data after all, and the verification was in its way.
