When AI Agents Start Spending Your Money | Alex Rampell & Terry Angelos

AI agents are moving from recommending purchases to making them, a shift the speakers said had accelerated over the prior three months as agents gained access to payment credentials. MUSE and Instinct became more useful with that access, although Amazon recently blocked MUSE. Terry Angelos said VGS secures payment credentials representing about one-third of e-commerce GMV, serving large merchants, neobanks, and frontier labs. The central question is no longer only what an agent should buy, but how it can pay while preserving consumer protections and merchants’ ability to recognize and serve customers.

Alex Rampell said merchants with more than $1 billion in GMV use an average of three to five processors, routing transactions according to cost, approval rates, and regional coverage. A processor-neutral vault can let them use those processors without separately storing credentials at each one. VGS vaults card details and network tokens, and can provide merchant-domain-bound tokens that work only on that merchant’s domain. About one-third of cards turn over each year; Rampell attributed roughly 25% of turnover to four-year expirations and another 5% to other causes. Network update tools help, but card changes can still interrupt charges. VGS says it holds about 10 billion credentials, and one speaker estimated it has seen or stored roughly 80% of cards in America.

Wallet providers are competing to connect with agents. The figures cited were about 300 million consumer accounts and 1 million merchants for Stripe Link, about 1.7 million merchants and a similarly sized consumer base for Shop Pay, and more than 400 million accounts and roughly 30 million merchants for PayPal, though the speaker cautioned that PayPal’s account total depends on how it is measured. Some wallets, like Apple Pay, provide a credential for the merchant to process; PayPal and Shop Pay can transact with the consumer and remit payment. In a Walmart example, Stripe Link used a one-time virtual card and charged the consumer separately. Walmart saw Stripe, not Walmart, on the bank statement, complicating disputes and recourse; the temporary card also interfered with converting a delivery charge into a Walmart Plus subscription.

Agentic tokens are meant to let wallets pass credentials through an agent while retaining card-network dispute rules and merchants’ ability to build customer relationships. A proposed flow could identify a verified agent and set a limit, such as $100. One speaker said agentic tokens had been at zero three months earlier and were then being provisioned at a few million per week, with VGS described as the largest provisioner. New standards require agents to register with Visa, Mastercard, or American Express and allow users to supply instructions and transaction context, such as finding a San Diego family hotel for no more than $500. It remains unsettled how to determine whether an agent followed instructions, resolve disputes, or assign liability for a mistaken purchase; merchants may resist being held responsible.

Merchants are unlikely to respond uniformly. Amazon may resist agents because it earns advertising revenue by influencing shoppers, while Walmart could benefit from its retail and delivery position and Shopify-associated small businesses may treat agents as a new sales channel. It is unclear whether Amazon customers can delegate logins to agents or whether Amazon can refuse access. The speakers compared the issue to open banking: banks such as Chase offered access through their own APIs, limited shared data, tokenized accounts, and could charge for access. Merchants may also deploy their own agents, effectively salespeople with commission-driven agendas; an Amazon API could reflect Amazon’s priorities rather than the customer agent’s. The speakers suggested consumers may benefit from competition, but the eventual arrangement is uncertain.

Agents could prompt purchases people forget or delay, while canceling unwanted subscriptions and trials so consumers can redirect the savings. Angelos argued that human wants and needs leave room for agents to generate additional purchases, and that agents may help users secure scarce services, such as restaurant reservations that otherwise require calling at 7 a.m. Rampell cautioned that early gains partly reflect an information asymmetry: few people use agents, and counterparties may not realize they are dealing with one. That advantage may fade as services recognize agents or insist on dealing with people. Angelos also warned that agents steering purchases to cards with the most points could unsettle rewards systems and models that depend on breakage. He described VGS’s next role as brokering credentials among parties under applicable rules, alongside its vault and tokenization work with banks.