AI Reports · GovAI (Oxford) · 2026-10-17 · Research paper
Compute and Compute Governance Permission Manifests for Web Agents December 2025 Research Paper Samuele Marro, Alan Chan, Xinxing Ren, Lewis Hammond, Jesse Wright, Gurjyot Wanga et al. The rise of Lar
LLM-based web agents interact with websites in ways that existing governance mechanisms were not designed for, and blanket blocking harms beneficial uses. The authors introduce agent-permissions.json, a robots.txt-style manifest in which websites specify allowed interactions, complemented by API references where available. This lets site owners block only non-compliant agents, and it is designed to complement data-use initiatives such as AIPref.