Show HN: Hyperbrowser MCP Server – Connect AI agents to the web through browsers (opens in new tab)

I feel like there's a lot to unpack here, and still much to discuss in the broader context.

There's a few things that can be excused or at least reasonably argued. Multiple IPs makes some sense since requests are being made through random proxies, and I don't think on its own demonstrates intention of bad behavior. If it was, I think you would've seen all four requests as coming from different IPs and with different user agents all posing as legitimate user browser sessions.

But the rest is inexcusable. Providing documentation on how to circumvent countermeasures without even acknowledging, or presenting a viewpoint on, the concern many have with the potential malicious use of these tools. Taking the time to respond to your inquiry about the IP range and UA but giving an answer that is somewhere between intentionally incomplete and intentionally misleading. (Is the actual IP range even within the large Google IP range given the source of the proxies as mentioned elsewhere in this thread?) Just very poor decisions on how to handle the extremely predictable resistance they were very obviously going to encounter

Your premise is flawed, or at the very least, far from guaranteed. One could use tools like this to use to browse the internet only as they would otherwise. One could also use it for mass scraping, and many do. If you've looked at HN on previous days this week, there's been a front-page story nearly every day about problems resulting from exactly that.

The parent comment was perhaps a bit too snarky with the assumption that this could/would only be used for malicious behavior on a large scale, but your assumption that it wouldn't be is not any better, and also runs contrary to what people have been experiencing and discussing in this arena in recent days

If what has been said elsewhere in this thread is true about providing documentation on how to circumvent attempts to detect/block your service and your resistance to providing helpful information such as IP ranges used and how user agents are set, then you have strayed far from being neutral and hands-off.

"it's not our place" is not actual neutrality, it's performative or complicit neutrality. Actual neutrality would be perhaps not providing ways to counter your service, but also not documenting how to circumvent people from trying. And if this is what your POV is, fine! You are far from alone--given the state of the automated browsing/scraping ecosystem right now, plenty of people feel this way. Be honest about it! Don't deflect questions. Don't give misleading answers/information. That's what carries this into sketchy territory

It is fine if that is the scope. It is also understandable why Anthropic chose to use a stateful protocol where stateless HTTP would be more than enough. They are catering for the default transport layer which is stdio based where state needs to be established.

There are also other aspects of it that are simply unnecessarily complex and resource intensive for no good reasons.