Web agents expose a language and access divide in professional research
A bilingual procurement-data test found sharp gaps in official-source retrieval, permissions and agent observability between the US and Iran.
A researcher tasked the web versions of GPT, Claude Cowork and Muse with updating World Bank procurement profiles for the United States in English and Iran in Farsi. Official government sites supplied 76–89% of citations for the US work but only 11–22% for Iran, while Claude opened just three of 16 Farsi pages and the agents substituted different lower-authority sources or workarounds. The small experiment suggests that agent interfaces can redistribute visibility in professional information markets according to what their browsers can reach and what their products choose to show, prompt or block.