Agents with Payment Authority: Would We Trust AI with Our Money?

Alexander starts with keeping the family supplied with groceries: repeating an old basket is insufficient because preferences and purchases change. Evgeny describes a Vinted search agent and unnecessary extension leads ordered alongside a drill. Aleksey separates payment security from understanding everyday context. The hosts examine five purchasing steps and distinguish authority to select goods from permission to transfer money through Checkout and Payment in AP2.

Companies want lower fees and less dependence on intermediaries, but their own payment systems require infrastructure and agreements. The participants differ over cryptocurrency refunds and establish no universal answer to complaints about goods. Evgeny proposes bounded marketing expenditure as a clearer autonomy use case. Human basket confirmation can also be a useful endpoint for automation.

Ordering requires current prices and stock, which may change during selection. Shopping inside a chat brings merchant incentives into focus: customer relationships, analytics, and additional sales. Banks and marketplaces risk losing the user interface. Personal devices and accumulated context might enable proactive shopping while increasing dependence on the assistant provider.

The closing discussion returns to responsibility and levels of delegation. Aleksey’s parental analogy is his position rather than an established rule for every payment. An agent might add a check before a transfer while remaining vulnerable to misleading descriptions and injected instructions. The hosts connect adoption to convenience, economics, and control over consequences, leaving predictions open.