If you ask ChatGPT to “please fetch https://whatmyuseragent.com/” in regular mode, it gives an answer like Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko); compatible; ChatGPT‑User/1.0; +https://openai.com/bot

Notice it clearly labels itself ChatGPT.

However, if you ask it the same thing in agent mode, it lies:

That is my user-agent, not ChatGPT’s!

This comment on Hacker News tries to find a gray area:

I find this problem quite difficult to solve:

1. If I as a human request a website, then I should be shown the content. Everyone agrees.

2. If I as the human request the software on my computer to modify the content before displaying it, for example by installing an ad-blocker into my user agent, then that’s my choice and the website should not be notified about it. Most users agree, some websites try to nag you into modifying the software you run locally.

3. If I now go one step further and use an LLM to summarize content because the authentic presentation is so riddled with ads, JavaScript, and pop-ups, that the content becomes borderline unusable, then why would the LLM accessing the website on my behalf be in a different legal category as my Firefox web browser accessing the website on my behalf?

But I really don’t think it is. While I would be equally annoyed to find my requests to ChatGPT to do research stymied, that doesn’t give ChatGPT the right to lie to other online businesses about ‘who’ it is.