From E-Commerce to A-Commerce: The Dawn of Agentic AI Payments

By: Judith Rinearson, Linda Odom, and Joshua L. Durham

Google’s recent announcement of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) raises a range of fascinating legal questions. The concept behind AP2 is to have a payment system that allows consumers to instruct AI empowered agents to search for and make purchases on that consumer’s behalf, using “intent mandates” and “cart mandates” that can provide “a non-repudiable audit trail” to establish “authorization and authenticity, providing a clear foundation for accountability.”

Google is not doing this on its own. A2P is open source and Google has partnered with over 25 payments related entities (such as American Express, PayPal, Coinbase, Adyen, MasterCard and WorldPay). This opens the door not only to Agent payments but also Agent-to-Agent or A2A transactions where both the purchaser and seller operate through what is referred to as “agentic AI.”

David Birch, UK author and commentator on digital financial services, recently noted that AP2 and the payment systems that it will generate “will reshape the very nature of e-commerce.” One fascinating aspect of AP2 is the fact that it is “payment agnostic”—it does not rely solely on the credit/debit card rails or ACH. Even more interesting (given the recent passage of the GENIUS Act), AP2 has integrated with a cryptocurrency protocol which would allow for agentic purchases from crypto wallets. As Birch explains:

The reason for this is obvious. Agents cannot have bank accounts, but they can have smart wallets that they use to store stablecoins and to spend them via AP2. That means an environment for permissionless innovation…

Yes, A2P is certainly likely to revolutionize how we shop and make payments. But the missing piece is the inevitable starting point. How does one confidently and accurately verify the true identity of the purchaser’s/seller’s agents? AP2 transactions are purported to be “non-repudiable”—but that depends on whether the identities of the purchaser’s/seller’s agents have actually been verified. While having an immutable blockchain audit trail will help, as many deep fake crypto scams have shown, it is not a fool-proof safeguard.

In the meantime, we lawyers have our own concerns. Completing a purchase and sale transaction usually triggers a range of state and federal laws, including the right of the purchaser to dispute the transaction if fraud or unauthorized activity is suspected. Unfortunately, when it comes to high tech solutions that can move money, high tech criminals are sure to be close behind.

For now, applicable agentic AI laws are essentially nonexistent. Until the inevitable machinery of laws and regulations kick into motion, both purchasers and sellers using agentic AI will have to rely on contractual terms to define the parties’ rights. While we always hope that such terms will be reasonably fair, clear, and conspicuously disclosed, past experience has demonstrated that unscrupulous actors are perfectly happy to mislead their customers if it makes them more money. All the more reason to make sure the agent you’re working with has a good reputation.