Adam Smith favored neither state socialism nor unbridled markets, but something subtler: a moral economy grounded in sympathy and the pursuit of human flourishing. In a world where markets look increasingly unmoored from ethics, we could do worse than to revisit what the "founding father" of economics actually wrote.

Earlier this year, Maryland state Senator Joanne C. Benson did something remarkable. She introduced Senate bill 1033, written for the “purpose of repealing online sports wagering” in the state. Now, I wouldn’t normally say a random state legislator introducing a proposal is a big deal. Except in this case, it’s the start of a counter-attack on the proliferation of corporate-run gambling across America, a trend that has largely gone un-rebutted since the 1970s. And Benson is not alone; lawmakers in Vermont and New York are seeking to push back, and more state legislatures are likely to follow.

Why the pushback? The answer is that corporate-run gambling is now pervasive in America, and Americans don’t like what they see. Gambling, particularly online sports betting, is now everywhere. About a fifth of Americans placed a bet in the past year, mostly through gambling apps. Since 2018, when online sports gambling got a big boost from a key Supreme Court decision, Americans have bet more than half a trillion dollars on sports.

And the attempts to change our culture are extremely visible; I watched the Dolphins-Ravens game last night on Amazon Prime, and I lost count of the number of ads for DraftKings and FanDuel, with various celebrities lending their names to this cultural phenomenon. Every major sports media network, sports league, and podcast are now working with a major gambling company. At this point, gambling is intrinsic to the financing of sports; FanDuel now operates “15 regional sports networks across the country previously on the brink of bankruptcy.”

The broad consequences are also extremely visible. Take athletics. Americans love sports, and that cultural centerpiece is being corrupted in an orgy of greed and speculative ferver. Last week, the government charged six people, including two NBA players, for gambling-related fraud. It’s also contributing to a courser culture, with a lot of unfair pressure on athletes. According to US News, “21% of sports bettors say they’ve verbally abused an athlete, either in person or online, after losing money on a bet.”

And that’s not even getting into the costs of fostering a nation of gamblers, lured in by an app-based model that is far more convenient and addictive than traditional in-person betting. Today, four out of five betters are using betting apps or online platforms. A quarter of bettors can’t pay a bill because of their wagers, a third have gambling debts, more than half carry credit card debts, and a quarter of them are afraid they can’t control their gambling. Economists are finding a “substantial increase in average bankruptcy rates, debt sent to collections, use of debt consolidation loans, and auto loan delinquencies” for consumers in states that legalized online sports betting versus those that restrict it to in-person locations. The estimates I’m told privately by experts in the field is that in the next five years, all gambling - including lotteries, Las Vegas casinos, and online sports betting - will likely see Americans lose a trillion dollars or so.

Last year, I did an Organized Money episode with Les Bernal and Dr. Kavita Fischer on the problem; Fischer is a psychiatrist who downloaded Draft Kings in 2022 to unwind after putting her kids to bed. She ended up losing $600,000, explaining to the Wall Street Journal the story of how DraftKings used sophisticated techniques to keep her betting, even as she desperately tried to stop. (Most of the loss was not on sports, but on standard casino games.)

Online sports betting is reaching new more politically empowered groups. Fischer’s story is very common, and it’s occurring among middle and upper middle class people who were never exposed to other forms of gambling, like state lotteries and casinos. It’s also hitting kids, who themselves are often calling in to help lines with addiction. It’s so common that Saturday Night Live did a viral skit for a fictional company called “Rock Bottom Kings,” which allows people to take bets on their degenerate gambling addict friend’s behavior.

Increasingly, people are turning against this form of betting. According to Pew, 43% of U.S. adults say “the fact that sports betting is now legal in much of the country is a bad thing for society,” up from 34% just a few years ago. And that’s concentrated among young men, who are most exposed; “47% of men under 30 say legal sports betting is a bad thing for society, up from 22% who said this in 2022.” And opposition is increasing faster among people who bet than people who don’t. It’s not that people oppose betting with friends, what’s problematic is the ability to build a business around being the house.

The Neoliberal Origins of Corporate Gambling

In an important sense, it’s odd that we’re even dealing with pervasive corporate-run gambling. Historically, Americans understood systemic gambling, and associated similar abuses of power like usury, as a moral and social catastrophe in waiting. That has been true since the 19th century, with many states making gambling unconstitutional, through to the fixing of the 1919 World Series, but it was also true well into the 20th century, when corporate gambling was constrained to mobster-run places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Even into the 1960s, courts prevented the patenting of gambling machines on the grounds they conflicted with the “sound morals of society.”

And culturally, we understood it as well, with gambling represented as a sinful and harmful enterprise. Take the 1987 smash hit movie Back to the Future II. In it, the villain, Biff Tannen, uses a time machine to alter the past so that he becomes a wealthy and corrupt casino magnate over a dilapidated town, Hill Valley. The hero, Marty McFly, in turn, must find a way to revert Hill Valley to its previous state. Back to the Future II was the third highest grossing film of 1989, and I remember as a kid we all saw it, and in school all my friends wondered whether hoverboards were real. Everyone just knew that corporate-run gambling was seedy.

With a few exceptions, up until the 1960s this attitude applied to all corporate gambling, from sports betting to lotteries, which were seen as similar to the “numbers racket” of the mob. But in 1963, New Hampshire Governor John King, egged on by the conservative Manchester Union Leader, signed a bill to create the first state lottery, to the horror of most newspapers nationwide and the Federal government, which arrested out-of-state residents for buying tickets.

Why did New Hampshire allow its new “sweepstakes” game? Well, it was pitched as part of the anti-tax revolution that would take over the nation fifteen years later. One of the key supporters was Bill Loeb, the arch-conservative publisher of the Manchester Union Leader, who “favored the Sweepstakes because he feared without it the Legislature would pass a sales tax — something he abhorred over all else.”

Pointing to the state’s reliance on so-called “sin taxes,” Loeb penned the strongest defense of the lottery yet. “No one has to go to the track and bet. No one has to smoke tobacco. No one has to drink. But how do those who oppose the Sweepstakes propose to raise the money? Either a sales tax or a property tax or some other kind of levy that people will have to pay, even though it will hurt them dreadfully to do so.”

The New Hampshire lottery served as the “legitimization” of gambling, turning it from a seedy activity into something sanctioned by a state. And it also set in motion the same dynamic with gambling we see today, which is that residents from outside of New Hampshire would buy lottery tickets from that state, because they couldn’t get them where they live. So their state officials would wonder why they are foregoing revenue, leading to a daisy chain of legalization. Corporate gambling tended to expand in a similar pattern. After people saw that a simple state lottery could bring in more revenue, they allowed more complex gambling games, and then in-person casinos and racetracks, slot machines, and sports betting. And every time someone tried to block the expansion, the response was “well people will just do it across state lines.”

After New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York created lotteries. Then, in the 1970s, a host of progressive-leaning states across the northeast created lotteries to deal with austerity budgets, and to capture the revenue they were foregoing when their own residents went to other states to buy lottery tickets. These included Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Illinois, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Much of the rest of the country legalized lotteries in the 1980s for similar reasons, though a few states - Utah, Alaska, and Hawaii - have not.

In the South, religious conservatives opposed gambling, but Reagan Republicans changed this dynamic. Moral scold Bill Bennett, who wrote “The Book of Virtues” and served as Secretary of Education and Drug Czar under Reagan, exempted gambling from his list of sins, himself carrying millions in gambling debts. A key actor was eventual RNC Chair Frank Fahrenkopf, who brought casino interests into the national Republican world, welding it together with Wall Street cash and big hotel chains by forming the American Gaming Association.

Corporations got into gambling in a major way. “Before 1989, you couldn’t get mainstream, Wall Street money in this industry,” said one reporter. “Now, not only can you get, they’re throwing it at you.” Fahrenkopf talked about the inflow of big corporate interests, it was now “professionals - people who have gone to business school.” These were “some of the brightest business men and women now involved in running these companies,” with the ability to “sit down with Goldman Sachs, or Bear Sterns or whoever it might be and convince them that number one, it’s a legitimate business.”

Martin Scorcese, in the ending of the iconic movie Casino, described this shift from the mob control of Vegas to Wall Street control. “Where did the money to rebuild the pyramids come from?” asked Las Vegas Sands casino leader and mobster Sam “Ace” Rothstein after he lost control of the town. “Junk Bonds.”

When the internet became mainstream in the 1990s, online gambling wasn’t legal, but online gambling offerings from offshore casinos became a major problem. Tennessee Senator Bill Frist, with a coalition of progressives and religious conservatives, moved a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006, which banned money transfers to offshore gaming companies. But the UIGEA had an exemption for fantasy sports, which proponents laughably called a game of skill and not chance. Over the course of the next two decades, the firms that took advantage of this law then unleashed a state-by-state lobbying campaign to legalize online sports betting.

The Supreme Court, in 2018, said states could legalize online sports gambling, unleashing a lobbying campaign such that 39 states now allow it. Today, when you pass sports bars on Sunday’s, many of them now have special sections dedicated to gambling. On a moral and political level, many Americans came to accept corporate gambling as just another business, like usury or wild forms of financial speculation.

Democrats often invite gambling as a mechanism to bring in more revenue for the state. And on the right, a former casino magnate, Donald Trump, is now in the White House, and his track record running that sort of business simply didn’t enter the political debate. Trump drew immense support from the anti-gambling religious right, and progressive Democrats mocked Trump for losing money running a casino, but not for engaging in that business in the first place.

In other words, Biff Tannen’s dastardly scheme to organize a town around gambling interests would today be framed as just good economic development.

What Is Actually Wrong with Corporate Gambling?

Beyond the substantive harm, there’s an ideological valence to corporate gambling. Corporate-run gambling is an unusual commercial activity, for two reasons. One is that there’s nothing produced, it’s a pure net transfer of wealth from the gambler to the casino. But the second and more important one is that it’s addictive, and thus coercive.

Gambling releases dopamine, the chemical behind pleasure and anticipation, and over time, it changes the chemistry of one’s brain to create a dependency on continuing the activity. As Fischer put it, “There was just something in my brain that made me keep going.” Thus, a company engaged in corporate gambling is seeking to take advantage of the other party’s very ability to govern their own rational faculties.

Most people think of legitimate market transactions as involving two parties coming together in a voluntary exchange based on reasonably honest information. You can go back to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, all the way through the populists and John Wanamaker, and find the basics of fair pricing - no coercion, no deception. But the coercion is real, and so is deception. Every online sports gambling commercial includes a help line if you have a problem, and all of the firms in the industry say they maintain ethical standards. And yet, as the Wall Street Journal story showed, their ideal customer is one who gambles excessively.

As legal scholar Matthew Lawrence noted, addiction is a fundamental threat to liberty. Because there is an imbalance in power between the parties in the transaction, corporate gambling requires far stricter rules and regulations, or perhaps even bans, than markets for goods that are not addictive.

Corporate gambling also has significant broader negative consequences. Online sports betting corrupts sports and the public itself. And states often derive revenue from the practice, meaning that legislators, even if they wanted to eliminate the activity, would have to plug a fiscal hole. Like all products that foster addiction, corporate gambling creates a form of social pollution, in the form of ruined lives and public corruption. And that’s why it’s important to impose market rules that significantly limit the activity and the political power of those who profit from it.

The Politics of Abolishing Predatory Gambling

While the religious right and Catholic institutions oppose gambling, progressives have not been particularly concerned until recently, preferring to scold around questions of race and gender than traditional fire and brimstone sins. But that is changing, as the left swings more towards concern over inequality and economics than non-commercial questions.

So what can be done?

Gambling is legal in other countries, for better or worse. There are a number of regulatory choices that lessen its impact. In the UK, for instance, they have what are called “stake limits” for certain online games, meaning that gamblers have a limit on the amount they can bet in any one contest. The stake limits are lower for certain ages. In addition, they regulate VIP programs such as the ones that entrapped Fischer, which has cut problem gambling somewhat.

In the U.S., we are just starting to figure out how to push back. There are possible levers around the use of data to target customers with advertisements, eliminating push notifications and VIP programs, prohibiting discrimination against “sharps,” aka people who are good at sports betting.

But there are significant hurdles, and not just the standard issues involved in dealing with well-capitalized corporate opponents, who engage in multiple forms of lobbying, everything from direct contacts with lawmakers to working with think tanks like the Progressive Policy Institute. Unlike most other industries, corporate gambling is also a partnership with the state. To run a casino, race track, or online betting app, you need a license, and must pay the state some portion of your revenues. States themselves run lotteries. And that means gambling revenue is part of state budgets.

Take Maryland. Out of $24.86 billion of state revenue last year, $1.589 billion came from the lottery, the state’s casinos, sportsbooks and daily fantasy sports operators. Most of that was from casinos and lotteries, sports was just $89.9 million. But if you want to outlaw this harmful activity, you have to find a way to replace 6.4% of Maryland’s budget, which is slightly less than the entire amount the state brings in from corporate taxes. The fiscal gains from gambling revenues are vastly overstated. In the short-term, it usually delivers, but quickly peters out. Indeed, Maryland Governor Wes Moore just increased taxes on sports betting, as a way to plug a budget gap. And the costs are likely higher than the revenue gains. Gambling, as it turns out, is just as addictive to states as it is to gamblers, with less bang for the buck over time.

And it gets worse during economic downturns, as Pat Garofalo wrote in his invaluable newsletter.

Lottery playing increases when joblessness rises, and more than 20 state lotteries set sales records during the Great Recession.

Because states have tied specific programs to lottery funding, they need that desperation, or else lottery-tied funding falls during economic downturns, when other revenues are also going south, leaving states with more holes they need to fill.

Just look at this recent interview with the executive director of the Virginia lottery. Though he pays a lot of lip service to ensuring that Virginians don’t become addicted to lottery games, it’s clear his overriding concern is ensuring that people keep playing even as the state’s economic outlook worsens.

He brings up expanding online games in order to bring in more young players, explains that “offering a mix of gaming experiences and price points helps draw in different kinds of players,” and says he wants to put lottery games into restaurants and bars — because nothing says “we’re taking gambling addiction seriously” quite like giving people easy access to gambling and alcohol together.

As Garofalo noted, 10 percent of Virginia’s public education is tied to gambling money. Even though gambling costs a state more than it brings in, cutting corporate gambling likely means it’ll be necessary to tax the wealthy.

Beyond the fiscal hurdles, there are attempts to make it impossible to even regulate gambling at a state level. Kalshi, a company that operates what it calls “prediction markets” to allow people to speculate on things like elections, is now offering sports betting. Kalshi claims that its sports betting is not gambling, but a form of useful financial market-exchange. That’s of course nonsense, but the goal is to have a Federal regulator, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, override state limits on gambling. If Kalshi wins on its legal argument, then online sports betting will be legal everywhere, without state permission. So far, Kalshi has won in Nevada and New Jersey, but lost in Maryland, which means this decision will eventually have to be addressed on appeal.

The politics of this particular administration on gambling are ugly; Trump’s first pick to run the CFTC was a board member of Kalshi; after he withdrew, the next pick is a lawyer for a firm that invested in Kalshi. Moreover, Donald Trump Jr. is an investor in Kalshi, and President Trump’s company, TruthSocial, is launching a predictions market as well (as is DraftKings).

All of these dynamics make the institutions hard to reform. Yet, the most important tool is public opinion, and that has not been brought to bear until recently.

The underpinning of the anti-corporate gambling movement is the same as the anti-monopoly argument. A free society relies on rules that prevent arbitrary coercion, both in and out of the marketplace. For a long time, we have neglected the role of commerce in a moral order, choosing to ignore gambling, usury, fraud, and deceit, as well as monopolization and a whole variety of games around price. What’s happening, as we are enveloped in a world of unreality, of crypto and fraud, AI bubbles, and sports gambling, is that the corruption of our society, with the rise of scams and flattery, is becoming impossible to ignore.

Senator Benson’s bill to roll back online sports gambling in Maryland may be one of the first important moves to go on offense against corporate gambling, but it won’t be the last.

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

Hello 4D friends, I’m finally caught up after a swamped summer, and wanted to share some new thoughts with you.

I always say yes to the Kinference conference (formerly Brooklyn Beta); it’s a reunion of early “design Twitter” people that always yields dozens of great conversations and hugs. This year’s focus this year was AI, since founder Cameron Koczon says designers can’t sit this tech trend out.

My favorite takes

• Kinference founder/MC Cameron Koczon thinks AI is a development on par with the iPhone in its impact on tech and culture. We could definitely decide to skip web3 and crypto, but we have to decide how we’re engaging with AI. What we do for the next 2-3 years will shape the rest of our careers (!) Go for “designer founder”, not just “founding designer.”

• Designer Frank Chimero’s first talk in 8 years, “Beyond the Machine” (long read but well worth it) provided a counterpoint to Rick Rubin and the vibe coding culture with the idea of a spatial relationship to AI, illustrated by Brian Eno’s musical thinking “beside the machine” / Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s musical thinking “within the machine” / Spirited Away as an allegory for “beyond the machine.”

• Designers Kelsey Aroian and Heather Phillips showed the emerging tropes for representing AI tech visually: sparkles, gradients, personas, AI-generated imagery, grids, and big data.

• Designer Pablo Stanley illustrated his increasing reliance on ChatGPT, professionally and personally, noting how a white collar job crisis also creates an identity crisis. We’re outsourcing more of our brains to AI, and perhaps productizing loneliness. If it only cheerleads, how do we grow?

• Shopify CDO Carl Rivera says that designers are the best-equipped people to lead the future. Teach your children that everything in the world is designed (poorly or powerfully). Aim for personal software (as niche as possible) or premium software (as polished as possible) — not the graveyard of average software in between.

• Strategist Chappell Ellison had my attention with her four key questions — NOT “Can design save the world?”, but:

  • How should we reshape design education?

  • Where’s all the good design writing?

  • How do we rebuild the network?

  • Where are we all hanging out?

On the non-AI side:

• Jonnie Hallman quit his job when he scored the right domain name: ball.app

• Tyler Mincey maintains the Teardown Library of old hardware in SF, and gave us an engineer’s look inside the iPhone 1 (which he helped ship)

A few thoughts after

1. The scale of VC investment in AI means they’re incentivized to hype it higher, so I take all AI press with a bucket of salt. AI is currently getting over half of all VC money, and the total was $252 billion in 2024 alone (estimates are over $1 trillion cumulatively). Investors need more of these AI companies to go big in order to recoup that. Many of the speakers at the conference were VCs, VC-funded, or VC-chasing, so the AI theme was expected, but they’re also closest to a lot of the action so I was overall glad to hear their stories.

2. I do agree AI is triggering a phase shift in tech (which is why I did my own qualitative research project to develop my POV on AI use last year). I need to update my POV doc to a v2, but everything is moving so fast! I still think AGI is a mirage, but a significant evolution of tech (adaptive interfaces, natural language agents, personalized everything) is increasingly concrete.

3. A significant omission at an AI-focused conference: any discussion of licensing models. We all know the LLMs are built on stolen content, it’s impossible to embrace them ethically unless we believe we’re in a proof-of-concept phase that does lead to a viable business model including content creators asap. I know there are models emerging, I’m not the best person to write about them but for example:

   • Who’s suing AI and who’s signing

   • Tracking the Licensing of Scholarly Content to LLMs

   • Frank did mention Public Diffusion, a model built entirely on public domain images (though it seems to have folded, unfortunately)

4. The issue I’m still chewing on: sure, GenAI is great for replacing collaborators if you don’t want pushback or delays or fees (or accuracy 😉). I’ve also heard teachers say their class Discords and Slacks are increasingly 🦗🦗🦗; students prefer to ask ChatGPT than feel stupid in front of classmates. AI tools create a world of unicorn creators and hyper-personalized learning. What are the second-order effects of dissolving so many human relationships?

5. And my biggest concern is the destruction of the information commons. Fake news was bad even before the GenAI boom. Sora is fooling even the deepfake detectors. Search results and social media feeds are polluted with bots and slop, and many individual contributors are retreating into dark forests of the internet. Are we creating a future without public facts, where clean data is privatized and commodified like water?

Other takes

• Rob Weychert had a critical take on the conference: “There were assertions that AI is not a replacement for a human while simultaneously marveling at how it allows you to bootstrap your startup with barely any headcount… A little compulsory hand-waving about unethically sourced training data. Maybe a sideways glance at the desecration of fact and the web being turned into a wasteland…”

• Jan-Paul Koudstaal (event photographer) had a full outline of the speakers.

Other news: UX Essentials

I also started teaching a new UX Essentials class in SVA’s Products of Design MFA program. What are the essentials these days? A mix of tech skills and conceptual skills and interpersonal skills… more on that soon!

AI agents need to browse the web on your behalf. When your agent visits a website to gather information, complete a form, or verify data, it encounters the same defenses designed to stop unwanted bots: CAPTCHAs, rate limits, and outright blocks.

Today, we are excited to share that AWS has a solution. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser, our secure, cloud-based browser for AI agents to interact with websites, now supports Web Bot Auth (in preview), a draft IETF protocol that gives agents verifiable cryptographic identities.

CAPTCHA friction

Customers tell us that CAPTCHA friction is one of the biggest obstacles to reliable browser-based agentic workflows. Your agent halts mid-task, waiting for human intervention to solve a puzzle that proves you’re not a bot – except your agent is a bot, and that’s the point. CAPTCHAs exist for good reason. Websites face constant challenges protecting their content, inventory and reviews. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) and bot detection services protect these sites, but they treat nearly all automated traffic as suspicious because they have no reliable way to distinguish legitimate agents from malicious ones.

Some automation providers try to solve CAPTCHAs programmatically – using computer vision models to read distorted text or clicking through image grids until the puzzle clears. This approach is brittle, expensive, and is bypassing controls that domain owners intended for their content. Other approaches rely on IP allowlists or User-Agent strings. IP allowlists break when you run agents in cloud environments where addresses change frequently. User-Agent strings can be spoofed by anyone, so they provide no verification, and pose a risk of people emulating well trusted strings. Both methods require manual coordination with every website you want to access, which does not scale.

Web Bot Auth: Cryptographic identity for agents browsing the web

Web Bot Auth is a draft IETF protocol that gives agents verifiable cryptographic identities. When you enable Web Bot Auth in AgentCore Browser, we issue cryptographic credentials that websites can verify. The agent presents these credentials with every request. The WAF may now additionally check the signature, confirm it matches a trusted directory, and allow the request through if verified bots are allowed by the domain owner and other WAF checks are clear.

AgentCore is working with Cloudflare, HUMAN Security, and Akamai Technologies to support this verification flow. These providers protect millions of websites. When you create an AgentCore Browser with signing enabled in the configuration, we automatically register your agent’s signature directory with these providers. Many domains already configure their WAFs to allow verified bots by default, which means you can see immediate CAPTCHA reduction without additional setup in the cases that this happens.

How domain owners control access

WAF providers give website owners three levels of control using Web Bot Auth:

• Block all bots – Some sites choose to block automated traffic entirely. Web Bot Auth does not bypass this – if a domain wants no automation, that choice is respected.
• Allow verified bots – Many domains configure their WAF to allow any bot that presents a valid cryptographic signature. This is the default policy for a growing number of sites protected by Cloudflare, HUMAN Security, and Akamai Technologies. When you enable signing, as a parameter in the AgentCore Browser configuration, this policy will apply to your agents.
• Allow specific verified bots to conduct only specific actions – For example, a financial services company automating vendor portal access can share its unique directory with those vendors. The vendor can create rules like “allow FinCo agents at 100 requests per minute, don’t allow them to create new accounts, and block all other signed agents.” This gives websites granular control while preserving the benefits of cryptographic verification.

Today’s preview release of Web Both Auth support in AgentCore Browser helps reduce friction with CAPTCHAs on domains that allow verified bots, by making your agent appear as a verified bot. Once the Web Bot Auth protocol is finalized, AgentCore intends to transition to customer-specific keys, so AgentCore users can use the tier of control that allows only specified verified bots.

Using the Web Bot Auth protocol

To enable the browser to sign requests using the Web Bot Auth protocol, create a browser tool with the browserSigning configuration:

import boto3
cp_client = boto3.client('bedrock-agentcore-control')
response = cp_client.create_browser(
    name="signed_browser",
    description="Browser tool with Web Bot Auth enabled",
    networkConfiguration={
        "networkMode": "PUBLIC"
    },
    executionRoleArn="arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/AgentCoreExecutionRole",
    browserSigning={
        "enabled": True
    }
)
browserId = response['browserId']

Pass the browser identifier to your agent framework. Here is an example using Strands Agents:

from strands import Agent
from strands_tools.browser import AgentCoreBrowser
agent_core_browser = AgentCoreBrowser(
    region="us-west-2",
    identifier=browserId
)
strands_agent = Agent(
    tools=[agent_core_browser.browser],
    model="anthropic.claude-4-5-haiku-20251001-v1:0",
    system_prompt="You are a website analyst. Use the browser tool efficiently."
)
result = strands_agent("Analyze the website at <https://example.com/>")

The agent is now configured to use the new browser tool that signs every HTTP request. Websites protected by Cloudflare, HUMAN Security, or Akamai Technologies can verify the signature and allow the request through without presenting a CAPTCHA, if the domain owner allows verified bots.

Protocol development

The Web Bot Auth protocol is gaining industry momentum because it solves a real problem: legitimate automation is indistinguishable from abuse without verifiable identity. You can read the draft protocol specification, HTTP Message Signatures for automated traffic Architecture. The architecture defines how agents generate signatures, how WAFs verify them, and how key directories enable discovery. Amazon is working with Cloudflare and many popular WAF providers to help finalize the customer-specific key directory format and work towards finalizing the draft.

Conclusion

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser is generally available, with the Web Bot Auth feature available in preview. AgentCore Browser signing requests using the Web Bot Auth protocol help reduce friction with CAPTCHA across domains that allow verified bots. As the protocol finalizes, AgentCore Browser intends to issue customer-specific keys and directories, so you can prove your agent’s identity to specific websites and establish trust relationships directly with the domains you need to access.

Web Bot Auth enables agents to prove their identity when challenged, reduces operational friction in automated workflows, and gives website owners control over which agents access their resources. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Browser support for Web Bot Auth (Preview) provides the infrastructure layer that makes this possible.

About the authors

Veda Raman is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect for generative AI and machine learning at AWS. Veda works with customers to help them architect efficient, secure, and scalable machine learning applications. Veda specializes in generative AI services like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker.

Kosti Vasilakakis is a Principal PM at AWS on the Agentic AI team, where he has led the design and development of several Bedrock AgentCore services from the ground up, including Runtime, Browser, Code Interpreter, and Identity. He previously worked on Amazon SageMaker since its early days, launching AI/ML capabilities now used by thousands of companies worldwide. Earlier in his career, Kosti was a data scientist. Outside of work, he builds personal productivity automations, plays tennis, and enjoys life with his wife and kids.

Joshua Samuel is a Senior AI/ML Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS who accelerates enterprise transformation through AI/ML, and generative AI solutions, based in Melbourne, Australia. A passionate disrupter, he specializes in agentic AI and coding techniques – Anything that makes builders faster and happier.

Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans, according to a study published on Thursday in Science.

Researchers working with chimpanzees at the Ngamba Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda probed how the primates judged evidence using treats inside boxes, such as a “weak” clue—for example, the sound of a treat inside a shaken box—and a "strong" clue, such as a direct line of sight to the treat. 

The chimpanzees were able to rationally evaluate forms of evidence and to change their existing beliefs if presented with more compelling clues. The results reveal that non-human animals can exhibit key aspects of rationality, some of which had never been directly tested before, which shed new light on the evolution of rational thought and critical thinking in humans and other intelligent animals.      

“Rationality has been linked to this ability to think about evidence and revise your beliefs in light of evidence,” said co-author Jan Engelmann, associate professor at the department of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a call with 404 Media. “That’s the real big picture perspective of this study.”

While it’s impossible to directly experience the perspective of a chimpanzee, Engelmann and his colleagues designed five controlled experiments for groups of anywhere from 15 to 23 chimpanzee participants. 

In the first and second experiments, the chimps received a weak clue and a strong clue for a food reward in a box. The chimpanzees consistently made their choices based on the stronger evidence, regardless of the sequence in which the clues were presented. In the third experiment, the chimps were shown an empty box in addition to the strong and weak clues. After this presentation, the box with the strong evidence was removed. In this experiment, the chimpanzees still largely chose the weak clue over the empty box. 

In the fourth experiment, chimpanzees were given a second “redundant” weak clue—for instance, the experimenter would shake a box twice. Then, they were given a new type of clue, like a second piece of food being dropped into a box in front of them. They were significantly more likely to change their beliefs if the clue provided fresh information, demonstrating an ability to distinguish between redundant and genuinely new evidence.

Finally, in the fifth experiment, the chimpanzees were presented with a so-called “defeater” that undermined the strong clue, such as a direct line of sight to a picture of food inside the box, or a shaken box containing a stone, not a real treat. The chimps were significantly more likely to revise their choice about the location of the food in the defeater experiments than in experiments with no defeater. This experiment showcased an ability to judge that evidence that initially seems strong can be weakened with new information.

“The most surprising result was, for sure, experiment five,” Engelmann said. “No one really believed that they would do it, for many different reasons.”

For one thing, he said, the methodology of the fifth experiment demanded a lot of attention and cognitive work from the chimpanzees, which they successfully performed. The result also challenges the assumption that complex language is required to update beliefs with new information. Despite lacking this linguistic ability, chimpanzees are somehow able to flexibly assign strength to different pieces of evidence.

Speaking from the perspective of the chimps, Engelmann outlined the responses to experiment five as: “I used to believe food was in there because I heard it in there, but now you showed me that there was a stone in there, so this defeats my evidence. Now I have to give up that belief.” 

“Even using language, it takes me ten seconds to explain it,” he continued. “The question is, how do they do it? It’s one of the trickiest questions, but also one of the most interesting ones. To put it succinctly, how to think without words?”

To hone in on that mystery, Engelmann and his colleagues are currently repeating the experiment with different primates, including capuchins, baboons, rhesus macaques, and human toddlers and children. Eventually, similar experiments could be applied to other intelligent species, such as corvids or octopuses, which may yield new insights about the abundance and variability of rationality in non-human species.

“I think the really interesting ramification for human rationality is that so many people often think that only humans can reflect on evidence,” Engelmann said. “But our results obviously show that this is not necessarily the case. So the question is, what's special about human rationality then?”

Engelmann and his colleagues hypothesize that humans differ in the social dimensions of our rational thought; we are able to collectively evaluate evidence not only with our contemporaries, but by consulting the work of thinkers who may have lived thousands of years ago. Of course, humans also often refuse to update beliefs in light of new evidence, which is known as “belief entrenchment” or “belief perseveration” (many such cases). These complicated nuances add to the challenge of unraveling the evolutionary underpinnings of rationality.

That said, one thing is clear: many non-human animals exist somewhere on the gradient of rational thought. In light of the recent passing of Jane Goodall, the famed primatologist who popularized the incredible capacities of chimpanzees, the new study carries on a tradition of showing that these primates, our closest living relatives, share some degree of our ability to think and act in rational ways.

Goodall “was the first Western scientist to observe tool use in chimpanzees and really change our beliefs about what makes humans unique,” Engelmann said. “We're definitely adding to this puzzle by showing that rationality, which has so long been considered unique to humans, is at least in some forms present in non-human animals.”