If you're building AI agents that browse the web, you've probably already hit the wall. Your agent works fine in local testing, then fails in production with 403s, CAPTCHAs, and blank responses. The problem isn't your code. It's your IP address.

Most AI agents run on cloud infrastructure — AWS, DigitalOcean, Hetzner — and those datacenter IPs are the first thing anti-bot systems flag. Mobile proxies fix this by routing agent traffic through real carrier IPs that can't be blocked without also cutting off thousands of legitimate mobile users.

This guide compares the four mobile proxy providers that actually make sense for AI agent workloads in 2026, with honest trade-offs for each. If you want a broader breakdown that includes residential and datacenter options, see our full 2026 mobile proxy provider comparison.

Why AI agents get blocked (the datacenter IP problem)

Every cloud provider operates from known IP ranges. AWS publishes theirs. DigitalOcean, Hetzner, GCP, all the same. Anti-bot systems maintain databases of these ranges and treat traffic from them with maximum suspicion.

When your AI agent runs on a VPS, its requests arrive from one of these flagged ranges. The symptoms are things you've probably already seen: HTTP 403 responses, CAPTCHA challenges on every page load, empty response bodies where the HTML is technically valid but the actual content was withheld, or aggressive 429 rate limits that throttle your agent after a handful of requests. Some sites go further and serve entirely different content to datacenter IPs, so your agent scrapes the sanitized version while real browsers see the actual page. If your agent suddenly started returning garbage data and you can't figure out why, check the IP it's running on first.

There's a trust hierarchy at work here. Datacenter IPs sit at the bottom. Residential IPs (assigned to home ISP connections) earn more trust because they're tied to real households. Mobile carrier IPs sit at the top because of how cellular networks work: carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT) means each mobile IP address is shared by thousands of real phone users simultaneously. Blocking a mobile IP means blocking all those legitimate users too. Most anti-bot systems won't take that risk.

For a technical breakdown of this mechanism, see our guide on how 5G mobile proxies bypass modern anti-bot systems.

This isn't a niche concern anymore. Browser Use has 78K+ GitHub stars as of early 2026, and agents running at scale regularly report blocking issues. AWS shipped first-party proxy configuration for Bedrock AgentCore Browser in February 2026, letting enterprise customers route agent traffic through their own proxy infrastructure. Bright Data launched an Agent Browser product purpose-built for autonomous agents. When AWS and Bright Data both ship agent-proxy products in the same quarter, it's not speculative demand anymore.

Quick comparison: mobile proxies for AI agents

1. Bright Data: enterprise mobile proxies with Agent Browser

Bright Data is the largest proxy provider in the market, and their mobile proxy network reflects that scale: 7M+ mobile IPs across 195 countries with 3G/4G/5G connections. For AI agent developers specifically, they've shipped an Agent Browser product that combines their proxy infrastructure with a hosted browser runtime. It supports Puppeteer, Playwright, and Selenium, handles CAPTCHA solving and anti-bot bypass automatically, and can scale to over 1M concurrent sessions.

Mobile proxy pricing starts at $8/GB on pay-as-you-go with no monthly commitment. Committed plans start at $499/mo ($7/GB for 71GB included) and scale down to $5/GB at the $1,999/mo tier. They also offer a Web Unlocker product that handles CAPTCHAs, fingerprinting, and retries as a managed service on top of their proxy network, which may be a better fit than raw mobile proxies for agent workloads where you just need the data and don't want to manage unblocking logic yourself.

On credibility, Bright Data is hard to argue with. 4.4/5 Trustpilot from 942 reviews, 20,000+ customers, and a compliance program that's been through enough scrutiny that enterprise procurement teams actually approve it. Their Proxy Manager dashboard gives you granular control over rotation, session management, and targeting. SOCKS5 is available through Proxy Manager.

Where it gets annoying: KYC is required before you can access mobile proxies, which adds friction if you just want to test quickly. The $499/mo minimum on committed mobile plans prices out smaller projects, and $8/GB on PAYG adds up fast for bandwidth-heavy agents. The platform itself has a learning curve. Mobile proxies, Agent Browser, Web Unlocker, Scraping Browser — there's meaningful overlap between these products, and it takes a while to figure out which one you actually need.

2. Oxylabs: largest mobile IP pool with precise geo-targeting

Oxylabs operates the largest mobile proxy pool in the market at 20M+ IPs across 140+ countries. Their mobile proxies support 3G/4G/5G/LTE connections with automatic rotation and 30-minute sticky sessions when you need to maintain the same IP.

The geo-targeting is where Oxylabs pulls ahead. You can filter by continent, country, state, city, GPS coordinates, and ASN at no extra cost. Need your agent to see localized content from a specific city or carrier? That level of targeting is available out of the box. Oxylabs also advertises 1.1-second average response time and 99.9% uptime, which matters when agents need to process pages quickly without stalling on proxy latency.

Pricing is $9/GB PAYG (up to 50GB/month), dropping to $8.25/GB on the Micro plan ($99/mo for 12GB) and $7.50/GB on the Advanced plan ($600/mo for 80GB). They're ISO 27001 certified and carry a Trustpilot rating of 4.0/5 from 702 reviews.

At $9/GB PAYG, Oxylabs is the most expensive per-GB option here. There's no agent-specific product like Bright Data's Agent Browser — you're working with standard proxy infrastructure and building your own automation around the API. No SOCKS5 for mobile proxies specifically. KYC is required, and the $99/mo entry plan only includes 12GB, which most agents burn through fast. The dashboard is well-designed for monitoring and zone management, but if you want a drop-in agent integration, you won't find one here.

3. Aluvia: budget mobile proxy with agent SDK

Aluvia is the cheapest mobile proxy for AI agents at $3/GB flat, with 4G IPs across 30+ US cities. They've built specifically for the agent ecosystem: Browser Use SDK integration, OpenClaw skills for browser and HTTP proxying, auto block detection that scores responses and triggers Cloudflare/DataDome/PerimeterX bypass, and hostname-based routing rules so you only proxy the domains that need it. Their smart routing feature automatically falls back to $0.30/GB datacenter proxies for unprotected domains, which can meaningfully cut costs for mixed workloads.

The catch: crypto-only payments (no credit cards, no invoicing), US-only coverage, 10-minute max sticky sessions, and no SOCKS5. Zero reviews on Trustpilot, G2, or Capterra as of February 2026. The $5 minimum deposit makes them trivially easy to test, but you're betting on a brand-new product with no third-party validation yet. The shared pool also means other customers' scraping behavior can affect your IP reputation, though that's the case with any shared-pool provider including Bright Data and Oxylabs.

4. Illusory: dedicated 5G mobile proxy infrastructure

Illusory runs bare-metal 5G hardware with single-tenant infrastructure. Each customer gets their own physical proxy device on major US carrier networks. No shared pools. No SDK-sourced IPs from residential devices. These are actual 5G modems in US data centers, and you're the only one using yours.

Pricing is $1/hr or $200/mo per proxy with unlimited bandwidth and support for 1,000 concurrent threads per proxy. HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 are all available, with instant IP rotation via API.

For agent fleets, the practical benefit is isolation. With shared-pool providers, another customer's aggressive scraping can get an IP flagged before your agent ever touches it. That doesn't happen here. Your proxy's reputation is entirely determined by your own usage. Combined with carrier CGNAT IPs that anti-bot systems inherently trust, this produces consistent unblocking performance that doesn't degrade based on what other users are doing. For compliance-sensitive operations where you need to know exactly where your traffic originates and who else is sharing that infrastructure, dedicated single-tenant proxies matter.

The honest trade-offs: Illusory is the most expensive option per-proxy on this list. At $200/mo, it costs far more than the per-GB pricing on Bright Data, Oxylabs, or Aluvia for low-volume workloads. However, the unlimited bandwidth means high-volume agents come out ahead on a per-GB basis. An agent transferring 100GB/month pays effectively $2/GB on Illusory versus $3/GB on Aluvia or $8-9/GB on Bright Data and Oxylabs. Coverage is US-focused with multi-city availability, so global coverage requires pairing with Bright Data or Oxylabs. For a deeper technical look at the 5G advantage, see our guide on how 5G mobile proxies bypass anti-bot systems.

How to choose a mobile proxy for your AI agent

The right choice depends on your agent's workload, budget, and where it needs to operate:

These aren't mutually exclusive. Some teams use a shared-pool provider like Bright Data or Aluvia for routine scraping and reserve dedicated Illusory proxies for the targets where consistency and isolation matter most. Whether you're building AI data pipelines for RAG or running autonomous browsing agents, matching the proxy tier to the workload keeps costs reasonable without sacrificing reliability where it counts.

One pattern we see often: teams start with the cheapest option that works, then upgrade when they hit reliability issues at scale. An agent running 10 requests/day doesn't need dedicated infrastructure. An agent fleet making 50,000 requests/day across protected sites probably does. Let the workload dictate the spend, not the marketing copy.

For more on matching proxy types to specific workloads, see our authority guide to choosing a mobile proxy for data operations.

Setting up mobile proxies with AI agent frameworks

Every provider in this comparison supports standard HTTP proxy configuration, which means setup looks nearly identical regardless of which one you pick. Bright Data and Oxylabs use a single rotating endpoint (you authenticate via username:password and the proxy rotates IPs automatically). Aluvia works the same way. Illusory gives you a dedicated endpoint per proxy with API-driven rotation. In all cases, your agent framework just needs a proxy URL and credentials.

Browser Use (Python)

Browser Use accepts proxy configuration through its BrowserConfig class. Pass a proxy dictionary with your server URL, username, and password:

browser_config = BrowserConfig(
    proxy={
        "server": "http://your-proxy-host:port",
        "username": "user",
        "password": "pass",
    }
)

browser_config = BrowserConfig(
    proxy={
        "server": "http://your-proxy-host:port",
        "username": "user",
        "password": "pass",
    }
)

browser_config = BrowserConfig(
    proxy={
        "server": "http://your-proxy-host:port",
        "username": "user",
        "password": "pass",
    }
)

browser_config = BrowserConfig(
    proxy={
        "server": "http://your-proxy-host:port",
        "username": "user",
        "password": "pass",
    }
)

See the full Browser Use parameter reference for additional options like allowed_domains and viewport configuration.

Playwright (Node.js / Python)

Playwright supports proxy configuration at browser launch. The proxy applies to all pages created from that browser instance:

const browser = await chromium.launch({
    proxy: {
        server: 'http://your-proxy-host:port',
        username: 'user',
        password: 'pass',
    },
});

const browser = await chromium.launch({
    proxy: {
        server: 'http://your-proxy-host:port',
        username: 'user',
        password: 'pass',
    },
});

const browser = await chromium.launch({
    proxy: {
        server: 'http://your-proxy-host:port',
        username: 'user',
        password: 'pass',
    },
});

const browser = await chromium.launch({
    proxy: {
        server: 'http://your-proxy-host:port',
        username: 'user',
        password: 'pass',
    },
});

General pattern

Any AI agent framework that uses Playwright, Puppeteer, or CDP under the hood accepts standard proxy configuration. If your framework wraps one of these libraries, look for a proxy or proxySettings parameter in its browser or session config. The format is nearly universal: a server URL plus optional authentication credentials.

For agents making direct HTTP requests (no browser automation), configure your HTTP client to use the proxy as an HTTP/HTTPS endpoint. All four providers in this comparison expose standard HTTP proxy endpoints that work with any HTTP library, from Python's requests to Node's axios. Illusory and Bright Data also support SOCKS5 for lower-level connection control.

Match your rotation strategy to the workload. Illusory offers instant rotation via API call. Oxylabs provides 30-minute sticky sessions with automatic rotation between them. Aluvia caps sticky sessions at 10 minutes. If your agent hits the same domain repeatedly, sticky sessions help avoid rate limits. If it crawls across many domains, rotating per request works better.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need a mobile proxy for my AI agent?

It depends on what your agent accesses. If you're hitting public APIs or sites without anti-bot protection, a datacenter IP or basic residential proxy works fine. If your agent runs into CAPTCHAs, 403 errors, or empty responses on sites protected by Cloudflare, DataDome, or similar systems, mobile proxies are the most reliable fix. The CGNAT mechanism behind mobile carrier IPs means anti-bot systems can't block them without also blocking thousands of real phone users, which makes mobile the highest-trust proxy type available.

What's the difference between residential and mobile proxies for AI agents?

Both use real consumer IP addresses instead of datacenter IPs. Residential IPs are assigned to home internet connections by ISPs. Mobile IPs are assigned by cellular carriers and shared across thousands of users through carrier-grade NAT. Anti-bot systems assign mobile IPs higher trust because blocking them affects many real users. In practice, mobile proxies get blocked less frequently than residential, particularly on sites with aggressive detection like major social platforms and e-commerce sites.

Can I use a free proxy with my AI agent?

You can try, but you'll regret it in production. Free proxies are slow, unreliable, and usually already blacklisted by any site worth scraping. You're also routing your agent's traffic (potentially including auth tokens) through unknown infrastructure, which is a security problem. For quick testing against unprotected sites, maybe. For anything real, no.

How do mobile proxies help with CAPTCHAs?

They don't solve CAPTCHAs — they prevent them from appearing in the first place. Anti-bot systems decide whether to present challenges partly based on IP reputation. Datacenter IPs get challenged constantly. Mobile carrier IPs carry high trust scores, so the challenge rate drops significantly. Your agent will still see occasional CAPTCHAs, but far fewer than on datacenter or residential IPs.

What's the cheapest mobile proxy for AI agents?

Aluvia at $3/GB is the cheapest per-GB option, though it's US-only and crypto-only. Bright Data starts at $8/GB PAYG, and Oxylabs at $9/GB. For high-volume workloads, Illusory's unlimited bandwidth at $200/mo can be the cheapest per-GB if you're transferring over 67GB/month ($200 / $3 breakeven vs. Aluvia). The right answer depends on volume, geography, and whether you need shared or dedicated infrastructure.

If your agents need the highest-trust mobile IPs with dedicated infrastructure and unlimited bandwidth, see Illusory's pricing. Each proxy runs on bare-metal 5G hardware assigned exclusively to your account, with instant IP rotation via API.

We're also building native SDK and MCP server integrations for popular AI agent frameworks. More on that soon. For now, any framework that supports standard proxy configuration works out of the box with Illusory's HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5 endpoints.

For the full breakdown of mobile proxy providers including detailed feature comparisons, see our 2026 mobile proxy provider comparison.