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Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/07/openais-chatgpt-agent-casually-clicks-through-i-am-not-a-robot-verification-test/ [arstechnica.com]

Maybe they should change the button to say, "I am a robot"?

On Friday, OpenAI's new ChatGPT Agent [arstechnica.com], which can perform multistep tasks for users, proved it can pass through one of the Internet's most common security checkpoints by clicking Cloudflare's anti-bot verification—the same checkbox that's supposed to keep automated programs like itself at bay.
[...]
a user named "logkn" of the r/OpenAI community posted screenshots [reddit.com] of the AI agent effortlessly clicking through the screening step before it would otherwise present a CAPTCHA [howtogeek.com] (short for "Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart") while completing a video conversion task—narrating its own process as it went.
[...]
The absurdity of an AI agent declaring it needs to prove it's "not a bot" while clicking through anti-bot measures has not been lost on observers. "In all fairness, it’s been trained on human data why would it identify as a bot? We should respect that choice," joked [reddit.com] one Reddit user in a reply.
[...]
Cloudflare's screening system, called Turnstile [cloudflare.com], often precedes actual CAPTCHA challenges and represents one of the most widely deployed bot-detection methods today. The checkbox analyzes multiple signals, including mouse movements, click timing, browser fingerprints, IP reputation, and JavaScript execution patterns to determine if the user exhibits human-like behavior. If these checks pass, users proceed without seeing a CAPTCHA puzzle. If the system detects suspicious patterns, it escalates to visual challenges.
[...]
OpenAI's Operator [arstechnica.com], an experimental web-browsing AI agent launched in January, faced difficulty [reddit.com] clicking through some CAPTCHAs (and was also trained to stop and ask a human to complete them), but the latest ChatGPT Agent tool has seen a much wider release.

It's tempting to say that the ability of AI agents to pass these tests puts the future effectiveness of CAPTCHAs into question, but for as long as there have been CAPTCHAs, there have been bots that could later defeat them. As a result, recent CAPTCHAs have become more of a way to slow down bot attacks [arkoselabs.com] or make them more expensive [arxiv.org] rather than a way to defeat them entirely. Some malefactors even hire out farms of humans [f5.com] to defeat them in bulk.
[...]
CAPTCHAs are just one example of the complex tasks ChatGPT Agent can handle. For example, another Reddit user showed off [reddit.com] a photo of a load of groceries that Agent apparently purchased. "I had agent mode order me some groceries from a local supermarket while I worked yesterday for pickup this morning," the Reddit user wrote [reddit.com].
[...]
But ChatGPT Agent isn't perfect. Some terrible website user interfaces are apparently better than CAPTCHA checkpoints at foiling the new bot. "Your agent did way better than mine," wrote [reddit.com] one Reddit reply. "Mine couldn’t figure out how to get to the stop and shop website."

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