Democracy and the open internet die in daylight (heatherburns.tech)

A news outlet is effectively offering free access to its content only to users who download PerplexityAI’s proprietary browser — a client built around “agentic” AI (autonomous, multi-step agents that browse, summarize and interact on behalf of users). The author frames this as "day 0" of an experiment to replace adtech-driven journalism funding with models that trade access for use of vendor-controlled AI software, rather than subscription or ad revenue. This matters because it signals a potential business-model shift with strong technical and civic implications: agentic browsers can centralize content access, perform large-scale scraping and interaction, and collect rich behavioral and contextual data, enabling new monetization and vendor-lock‑in strategies. That substitutes one surveillance-heavy infrastructure (adtech) for another (proprietary AI platforms), risks reinforcing gatekeepers and licensing conflicts, and raises privacy, antitrust and open‑web concerns. For the AI/ML community the move spotlights how agentic capabilities will be used commercially — not just for UI improvements but as levers of distribution, data capture, and power over information flow — and underscores the need to think about governance, transparency and user consent as models evolve.