Major banks warn AI shopping agents outpace consumer protections, urge mandatory disclosure

Your bank is now officially worried about the bot doing your shopping. On September 22, 2026, a coalition of major financial institutions — NatWest, Bank of America, ING, Capital One, ASB Bank, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia — released a joint report warning that AI-powered shopping agents are creating meaningful new risks around fraud, scams, and consumer data privacy, and that those risks are arriving faster than the rules designed to contain them.

The technology in question — sometimes called agentic commerce — involves AI tools that browse, compare, and complete purchases on a consumer's behalf. Tech firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta are actively promoting such agents as the next frontier of online retail. Retailers are already feeling the pull: at British retailer John Lewis, the share of search traffic coming from AI agents climbed to 2.5% from just 0.3% the previous year, and the pace of growth is picking up.

Consumers are unclear if AI will act in their interests. They are concerned that AI agents may buy the wrong thing or spend too much – or even worse, lose their money to scams and fraud. They are not sure whether they will be protected or who they will need to go to if things go wrong.— Coalition banks, joint report

The report identifies several concrete hazards. AI agents, in their current form, may directly solicit and enter payment card details during automated checkout flows, or steer users toward payment channels that carry weaker consumer protections than the shopper would have chosen independently. The banks also flagged a deeper structural problem: when an AI agent completes a transaction that goes wrong, responsibility for that failure is genuinely difficult to assign — potentially falling on the consumer, the platform hosting the agent, the AI developer, or the retailer. Existing consumer protection frameworks were not written with that question in mind.

For the banks, this is not an abstract concern. Financial institutions sit at the end of every transaction: fraud costs, chargebacks, and reputational exposure from customers losing money all run through the banking system. The report positions the coalition as active participants in conversations with legislative bodies, not bystanders.

Their proposals to policymakers center on three demands: mandatory disclosure whenever an AI agent participates in a financial transaction; greater transparency about how AI shopping tools make decisions; and stronger standards governing how customer data is handled when agents are operating. The report also states that shoppers and merchants should retain the freedom to choose which AI-powered services they use, and that different systems should be interoperable.

Consumer hesitation about the technology is already measurable. Surveys by the Consumer Bankers Association and Forrester showed that a notable portion of people are unwilling to allow AI agents to carry out purchases on their own, with respondents pointing to the risk of errors, a feeling of diminished control, and worries about the exposure of their payment details. The banks' report acknowledges that consumer enthusiasm for the category is real; the gap, as they frame it, is between wanting the technology and being adequately protected while using it.

Why it matters — As AI shopping agents move from novelty to mainstream retail infrastructure, the rules governing who is liable when they fail — and how your payment data is protected — do not yet exist, leaving consumers exposed and banks on the hook for the fallout.

Reported by reuters.com, independent.co.uk, cryptobriefing.com