Banks warn AI shopping bots could enable scams before rules catch up
NatWest, Bank of America and four other major banks say AI shopping agents raise fraud and privacy risks, and set out early principles for safer "agentic commerce."
What happened: On Tuesday, a coalition of major banks including NatWest and Bank of America, along with four others, publicly warned that AI shopping agents carry real risks of scams, fraud and data-privacy breaches. Alongside the warning, the banks laid out a first set of principles meant to guide how 'agentic commerce' (AI systems that browse and buy on a person's behalf) gets built. The move comes as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta all push AI chatbots as shopping assistants.
Why it matters: Banks are the ones who typically absorb fraud losses and handle customer complaints when a purchase goes wrong, so a joint warning from several of them carries weight. Their message: the industry is racing toward letting AI agents complete purchases before basic guardrails, such as verification, liability rules and dispute processes, are settled. For everyday shoppers, that gap matters because it's unclear who is on the hook if an agent is fooled by a fake retailer or mishandles payment details.
How it works, plainly: An AI shopping agent works differently than clicking 'buy' yourself: it can search, decide which listing looks legitimate, and place an order using saved payment details, removing the moment where a human normally double-checks a site or price. If a scam site fools the AI instead of the person, existing fraud checks, many of them tuned to catch suspicious human behavior, may not apply the same way. That is the blind spot the banks say has not been addressed.
The rollout: The full detail of the banks' proposed principles has not been made public in reporting so far, so it's unclear whether the AI companies building these shopping agents will actually adopt them, or whether regulators will step in to require anything. For now, this is banks flagging a problem and offering to help write the rulebook before agentic commerce becomes a default way people shop online.