The internet was built open. Counterinfra is infrastructure to keep it that way.
We are a coalition of organizations, companies, and individuals working on transparent, decentralised, and verifiable web automation. Access policies should be chosen by the people who use the web — not imposed by the platforms that sit on top of it.
Why now
For years, a small number of people in the web scraping industry dealt with a quiet problem: the open web was slowly closing. Rate limits, bot detection, legal threats, CAPTCHAs — all framed as "security" but functioning as access control.
Now everyone is facing it.
AI agents need the web. Users want agents to act on their behalf — book flights, compare prices, fill forms, read pages. But the infrastructure to do this openly and verifiably doesn't exist. What exists instead are walled gardens, proprietary browser clouds, and a proxy industry where ethical operators get blanketed alongside bad actors because there's no standard way to tell them apart.
OpenClaw made this visible at scale. But the underlying tension has been here for a decade. The question was always the same: who decides what software can access the web, and on whose terms?
What we believe
Users own their access. If a human can visit a page, software acting on their behalf should be able to as well — with their explicit authorization.
Transparency over stealth, whenever possible. Web automation should be identifiable, auditable, and honest about what it's doing. Not because regulation demands it, but because it's the right default.
Decentralised by design. No single company should control the infrastructure that connects agents to the web. Not us, not anyone.
Adversarial posture is a choice. Websites should be able to define their own access policies. Users should be able to define theirs. The protocol should make both legible.
WAIS
The Web Agent Interaction Standard is the coalition's first proposed standard. It gives websites a way to declare what agents can do — and gives agents a way to prove a human authorized them.
WAIS replaces the current model (block everything, then allowlist specific partners) with something more like the early web: open by default, with clear rules for everyone.
The spec, reference implementation, and tooling are open source.
Coalition members
Deeger — Web infrastructure for AI agents. Crawling, extraction, compliance. Maintains WAIS.
Bountyy — High-end penetration testing and cybersecurity solutions. WAIS security lead.
This is early. If you're building in this space and these ideas resonate, reach out.