Agentic Commerce Hits a Wall: Hilton, Amazon and the Bot Blocking Fight

Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's biggest enterprise customers, have roughly halved their Claude usage, and both are running their own models instead. Dave's diagnosis is the one nobody else is making: Claude was over-tuned for parasocial relationships, people got into something unhealthy with it, and organizations are now quietly backing away. Sam is blunter about the business. He runs Claude as infrastructure, but switching off would be a one line change he'd never think about twice. Then it gets strange: a dinner where only the lab researchers raised their hands when asked if one company will be left standing, a lab that believes the machine god will go back in time and simulate hell for anyone who didn't build it, and Sam's case that Silicon Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets. Plus Hilton's website trapping Sam's agent in a doom loop, and Dave and Sam inventing the Agent Treaty Framework on air. Jess is at an offsite, so it's three VCs and no journalist.

In this episode:

- Why two of Anthropic's largest customers cut their Claude usage in half, weeks before the IPO

- Dave on parasocial tuning as the thing that actually burned Claude, and how you can spot Claude slop on Twitter

- Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley about putting infinity in a spreadsheet

- The dinner question about one company being left standing, and who raised their hand

- The personal agent protocol from Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe and Sierra, and why Dave says it's about commerce, not protection

- Hilton, Cloudflare and Amazon blocking agents, and whether holding the line counts as collusion

- Dave on building agents versus building agency, and whose potential we're underwriting

- The Agent Treaty Framework: why pairwise deals replace standards when negotiation is free

- Megalith buying unexercised pro rata from seed funds, and Sam's war story about the fund that quashed his

Chapters:

00:00 Trailer

00:51 Brit Moderates: Three VCs and No Journalist

03:43 Peptide Protocols, the Wolverine Stack, and a Dexa Scan

07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder Movie

09:30 Meta and Microsoft Halve Their Claude Usage

10:13 Dave: Claude Was Over-Tuned for Parasocial Relationships

11:19 Sam: Switching Off Claude Is a One Line Change

13:46 Zero, Infinity, and What Crypto Taught the Valley

17:53 The Dinner Where Only the Lab People Raised Their Hands

19:41 The Lab That Believes in the Machine God

20:01 Lab Leaks, Infinite Liability, and What a Real Framework Looks Like

21:56 The Personal Agent Protocol: Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe

23:01 Sam: Nobody Should Care About MCP

24:03 Hilton Traps Sam's Agent in a Doom Loop

26:30 If You Ran Hilton, Would You Let the Bots In?

27:15 Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and the Missing Value Trade

29:41 Dave: Building Agents vs Building Agency

33:53 The Social Media Era Already Ran This Experiment

37:02 The Agent Treaty Framework Is Born

38:16 Why Standards Are Over and Treaties Are Next

41:28 Megalith and the Market for Unexercised Pro Rata

42:32 Sam's Pro Rata War Story

45:53 64% of LPs Now Want Co-Invest Rights

48:03 What Hedge Fund Letters Say That VCs Don't

49:20 Main Street Says It Hates AI, Then Uses It

53:27 Plug of the Week: The Mill

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Connect with us here:

1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin

2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin

3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin

4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.