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

<p>Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic&#39;s biggest enterprise customers, have roughly halved their Claude usage, and both are running their own models instead. Dave&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t build it, and Sam&#39;s case that Silicon Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets. Plus Hilton&#39;s website trapping Sam&#39;s agent in a doom loop, and Dave and Sam inventing the Agent Treaty Framework on air. Jess is at an offsite, so it&#39;s three VCs and no journalist.</p><p><br></p><p>In this episode:</p><p>- Why two of Anthropic&#39;s largest customers cut their Claude usage in half, weeks before the IPO</p><p>- Dave on parasocial tuning as the thing that actually burned Claude, and how you can spot Claude slop on Twitter</p><p>- Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley about putting infinity in a spreadsheet</p><p>- The dinner question about one company being left standing, and who raised their hand</p><p>- The personal agent protocol from Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe and Sierra, and why Dave says it&#39;s about commerce, not protection</p><p>- Hilton, Cloudflare and Amazon blocking agents, and whether holding the line counts as collusion</p><p>- Dave on building agents versus building agency, and whose potential we&#39;re underwriting</p><p>- The Agent Treaty Framework: why pairwise deals replace standards when negotiation is free</p><p>- Megalith buying unexercised pro rata from seed funds, and Sam&#39;s war story about the fund that quashed his</p><p><br></p><p>Chapters:</p><p>00:00 Trailer</p><p>00:51 Brit Moderates: Three VCs and No Journalist</p><p>03:43 Peptide Protocols, the Wolverine Stack, and a Dexa Scan</p><p>07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder Movie</p><p>09:30 Meta and Microsoft Halve Their Claude Usage</p><p>10:13 Dave: Claude Was Over-Tuned for Parasocial Relationships</p><p>11:19 Sam: Switching Off Claude Is a One Line Change</p><p>13:46 Zero, Infinity,