> but I always imagined some sort of standard, where apps and services can expose a set of pre-approved actions on the user's behalf
I sincerely hope it's not the future we're heading to (but it might be inevitable, sadly).
If it becomes a popular trend, developers will start making "AI-first" apps that you have to use AI to interact with to get the full functionality. See also: mobile first.
The developer's incentive is to control the experience for a mix of the users' ends and the developer's ends. Functionality being what users want and monetization being what developers want. Devs don't expose APIs for the same reason why hackers want them - it commodifies the service.
An AI-first app only makes sense if the developer controls the AI and is developing the app to sell AI subscriptions. An independent AI company has no incentive to support the dev's monetization and every incentive to subvert it in favor of their own.
(EDIT: This is also why AI agents will "use" mice and keyboards. The agent provider needs the app or service to think they're interacting with the actual human user instead of a bot, or else they'll get blocked.)
Because Apple. Apple has the power over developers not the other way around, and it has shown quite strong interest in integrating AI into their products.
For example, by guiding your users to app instead of website, you immediately "lost" 30% of your potential revenue from them. On paper it sounds like something no one would every do. But in reality most developers do that.
I sincerely hope it's not the future we're heading to (but it might be inevitable, sadly).
If it becomes a popular trend, developers will start making "AI-first" apps that you have to use AI to interact with to get the full functionality. See also: mobile first.