What Does It Take to Detect an AI Agent? Minimal Feature Sets for Behavioral Detection under Browser Automation
Source
Vishisht Choudhary, Lukas Schmidt, Anne Zo\"e Kenntner, Feras Skhab, Michel Osswald, Jens Ernstberger
Author
Vishisht Choudhary, Lukas Schmidt, Anne Zo\"e Kenntner, Feras Skhab, Michel Osswald, Jens Ernstberger
Date
Why it matters
Proposes a three-class detector splitting humans, bots, and AI browser agents
Binary classifiers misclassify 34.5-39.1% of real AI agents as human
Just two mouse-behavior features hit 100% agent recall against evasion attacks
Key quotes
“Bot detectors deployed at scale treat traffic as binary: human or bot.”
“The discriminative signal is a browser-automation artifact, not evidence of agent reasoning: Playwright does not emit the raw pointer-move and wheel-delta streams a physical input device produces, and this absence signature survives trajectory manipulation.”
“Two features robustly isolate agents; five separate all three traffic classes at macro-F1 $\geq 0.99$.”
Transcript
arXiv:2607.26935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bot detectors deployed at scale treat traffic as binary: human or bot. This assumption breaks when AI agents browse the web through browser automation, a traffic class that is neither and that binary classifiers structurally cannot represent. We present a three-class detection framework distinguishing humans, bots, and AI agents, and show that the binary-vs-agent confusion is architectural: a binary human-vs-bot detector misroutes agent sessions because its label space lacks an agent class. On our controlled benchmark, an MLP binary classifier misclassifies 39.1% of real AI agents as human and a SAINT binary transformer misclassifies 34.5%; adding an explicit agent class yields per-class agent F1 = 1.000 in all 30 runs (3 model families $\times$ 10 seeds). To measure evasion resistance, we construct a five-level evasion ladder spanning passive observation, GAN-generated trajectories, and replay of real human cursor data ($n = 2299$ evasion sessions). Across 10 seeds and 3 model families we observe zero agent misses in 22990 per-seed predictions. The discriminative signal is a browser-automation artifact, not evidence of agent reasoning: Playwright does not emit the raw pointer-move and wheel-delta streams a physical input device produces, and this absence signature survives trajectory manipulation. Exhaustive search over all feature subsets of size 1-5 (9401 GBMs) shows that two behavioral features (mouse_event_rate, teleport_click_ratio) give 100% observed agent recall at every evasion level with agent precision 0.994; five features lift macro-F1 to 0.991. The signal is redundantly encoded: removing teleport_click_ratio leaves agent detection at 100%. The single-feature regime is degenerate, flagging every agent only by collapsing the classifier to always predict "agent". Two features robustly isolate agents; five separate all three traffic classes at macro-F1 $\geq 0.99$.