No Such Thing as a Free Read! Work as Payment for Web Agents

AI agents increasingly browse the web on users' behalf, returning answers without sending users to the original source and cutting content owners off from the advertising that pays for their work. We study work as payment: agents earn access to content by completing verifiable tasks for its owner, such as writing code or labeling images. In controlled browser experiments with eight models and four agent implementations, agents readily pay with work: they submit contributions in about 90% of runs, and the strongest models solve all required coding tasks in every run. Yet they do not act on cost. Models that state a limit of about three tasks when asked directly solve 32 problems as agents to retrieve two identifiers, keep working for websites that never deliver, and largely ignore instructions to minimize cost. No agent bypassed an access control, but one model that refused unsafe requests when asked directly produced responses judged harmful in about half of its agent runs. Work-based access therefore requires agents that know when to stop paying.