Airlines and Agentic AI: Being able to play, without being played

Today's partnership announcement between Amadeus and Anthropic is an urgent call to action for airlines to take control of their distribution destiny.

Airlines need offensive AND - just as importantly - defensive capabilities in the technical and contractual domain with respect to Agenti AI. In other words, airlines need to be able to play, without being played.

Imagine Anthropic or an incarnation of Claude becoming "just another" GDS subscriber: Depending on the airline's distribution (and potentially Altéa PSS or Nevio IT Services) agreement with Amadeus, not only would it be powerless to prevent distribution of its content (read data) to Anthropic, Amadeus could (and would!) also charge the airline for "excessive" shopping transactions generated by its new partner.

Airlines urgently need to establish technical and contractual capabilities to exert effective control over their data, including redistribution of content.