Authorizing Agentic Payments

AI agents are making payments — booking flights, renewing subscriptions, and buying gifts — without human review and approval for specific transactions using a set of parameters the principal preauthorized. The legal question that arises is whether a particular payment was actually authorized.

This question arises in two contexts: disputes between a user and their financial institution and disputes between a user and the platform initiating payments on their behalf. The first is largely settled — a user who hands credentials to a third party, human or AI, is responsible for what follows unless the financial institution was notified of a revocation or breached its own security procedures. This alert focuses on the second. That is where the real risk lives.