Yesterday Google put me in a captcha loop. Five minutes of prove-you’re-human. Still declined.
Agents act from datacentres, and identity providers treat that as suspicious. Harness choice is now about lock in and blast radius.
I was signing into another app. The session was coming from a machine that isn’t in my house. A datacentre. That’s how agents work. They act from somewhere that isn’t your laptop.
Google already treats that as suspicious. Captcha first. Then no.
This morning’s fight on HN is the same thing with a ToS attached. Antigravity: third-party OAuth (OpenClaw and friends) can get the account suspended. Orosz and Theo both loud. Google’s Antigravity lead says they meant the Antigravity account, not Gmail. People don’t believe the blast radius stays that small. They’ve watched full Google accounts go.
Harness choice is now lock-in and blast-radius, not just quality. The next fight is who owns the OAuth token.
If the identity provider can tell your agent isn’t sitting at your desk, they can gate every connection you authorised it to make. Terms written for a person at a keyboard don’t cover a person with agents.
So what do we do. Burner Google accounts for agent work. Pay-per-token keys only. Keep the real identity off the harness. Wait for an “acting for me” grant that survives a datacentre IP.
The ToS is the policy. The captcha is the enforcement. Both already exist.