Who Pays When an AI Agent Makes the Wrong Purchase?
The Payment Rails Are Ready for AI Agents. The Law Isn't.
TL;DR: In a single week in March 2026, Stripe's Machine Payments Protocol went live, Mastercard agreed to acquire stablecoin firm BVNK for $1.8 billion, and Visa launched a command-line tool for AI agent payments. Every major payment rail is now being rebuilt for AI agents. But when your agent buys the wrong thing — or buys the right thing at the wrong price, or spends beyond what you intended — the law has no clear, tested answer for who absorbs the loss. The infrastructure is racing ahead of the legal framework. Nobody is talking loudly enough about what happens when the agent is wrong.
Let me describe something that is no longer hypothetical.
You authorize an AI agent to handle your weekly grocery order — $150 budget, "buy the usual." Overnight, the agent interprets that instruction liberally, catches a...
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