The Agent With Your Credit Card: Spend Mandates, Merchant Fraud, and Disputes When the Buyer Is Software
During the 2025 holiday season, AI agents drove roughly 20% of global e-commerce orders — about $262 billion in sales. That number hides a much stranger fact: almost none of the payment infrastructure those orders flowed through was designed for a non-human buyer. The card networks' entire trust model — the device fingerprint, the IP address, the behavioral biometrics, the "cardholder present" signal — assumes a person is on the other end of the transaction. When an agent checks out, every one of those signals is either missing or synthetic.
The industry's answer is arriving as a delegation layer: cryptographically signed mandates that prove a human authorized a purchase before the software made it. But between the protocol announcements and the operational reality sits a set of unsolved problems that anyone building agentic checkout — or selling through it — needs to understand. The most important one has no answer yet: when the agent buys the wrong thing, who eats the loss?
