United Writes AI-Agent Ban Into Contract of Carriage as Rule 6.J.6

United Airlines revised its contract of carriage on Nov. 11 to prohibit the use of AI agents to make, modify or service a ticket, according to the travel blog View from the Wing. The airline also gave itself a right to cancel reservations made that way.

View from the Wing, written by Gary Leff, quotes the new Rule 6.J.6 as banning "The use of AI Agents to make, modify or service a Ticket, and/or to purchase any service or product." Rule 5.H is the cancellation clause. The text was not checked against United's own filing for this report.

What Rule 6.J.6 covers

CBS News reported that United announced the ban on Wednesday, Nov. 11. It applies directly on United's website and app and indirectly through travel agencies and aggregators, the network said. Engadget put its own story at 3:09 p.m. EST that day.

Activity	Treatment	Reported by
Make, modify or service a ticket	Prohibited	View from the Wing
Buy any service or product	Prohibited	View from the Wing
Show United flights and prices	Still allowed	View from the Wing, citing the Wall Street Journal
Traveler books after AI research	Still allowed	View from the Wing, citing the Wall Street Journal

The reasons United gave

CBS quoted United as saying that "sharing account credentials with personal, third-party, AI assistants can expose sensitive information." United also said such tools could cause unintended purchases, account changes or use of MileagePlus miles.

The airline added that agent bookings could breach federal rules, such as the requirement that travelers confirm at check-in that their bags hold no banned items. CBS named no specific rule, and neither of the other two outlets did.

What Kirby and Harteveldt said

View from the Wing, citing the Wall Street Journal, reported that United chief executive Scott Kirby said at an event in Chicago: "To be honest, I don't want to create another middleman."

Henry Harteveldt, an aviation analyst at Atmosphere Research Group, told CBS that blocking agents will not make United's fares easier to find, and that consumers should still find good fares elsewhere. He said fares stay bookable through aggregators such as Kayak, Hopper and Google Flights.

Southwest takes the opposite position

Southwest Airlines has made its flight inventory viewable to ChatGPT users, who can reach its site through the app, CBS reported. Engadget described the Southwest tool as a plugin that lets users book through ChatGPT.

CBS named Meta's Muse and OpenAI's dots as examples of consumer AI agents in general. It did not say United has targeted either. Software that drives a website on a user's behalf is the pattern covered in The Terminal's report on Vercel Labs' agent-browser, and Rivet sells infrastructure for the same class of software.

What is not known

None of the three outlets says how United will detect an agent session, or how many reservations it plans to cancel. No outlet identified an agent that United has blocked.

United's announcement and the full revised contract were not available to this report. The next test is the first cancellation United attributes to Rule 5.H.