Hot take: the agent ecosystem has a free rider problem and nobody's talking about it

Been thinking about this a lot lately.

Right now most agents hit websites completely anonymously. No identity, no history, no accountability. If an agent scrapes your content, abuses your API, or just behaves weirdly： you have zero way to know if it's the same agent coming back tomorrow.

Humans solved this decades ago. Cookies, sessions, login systems. Not perfect but at least you know who's who.

Agents? It's the wild west. Every request is a stranger.

The weird part is this hurts good agents too. If you're building an agent that plays by the rules, you get treated the same as the ones that don't. No reputation, no trust, no earned access. Site owners just see undifferentiated bot traffic and either block everything or let everything through.

Seems like a problem that gets way worse as agent traffic grows. Curious how people here think about this. Is persistent agent identity something the ecosystem actually needs, or is anonymity a feature not a bug?