Why Your AI Agent Is a Customer the Law Can't Handle: DEX in the City

Summary

Katherine Kirkpatrick Bos and Jessi Brooks discuss the legal challenges of agentic finance, where AI agents act as customers. They outline three key 'receipts'—identity, mandate, and accountability—needed to handle software as a financial actor. Robinhood's new agentic Gold Card feature illustrates the conflict with existing chargeback laws.

• Agentic finance requires treating software like a customer, breaking traditional financial plumbing assumptions.
• Three legal receipts are proposed: identity (who the agent is), mandate (what it can do), and accountability (who bears loss).
• Robinhood now lets users instruct AI agents to make purchases using the Gold Card, raising chargeback and fraud issues.
• Current laws assume a human is taking action, creating a conundrum for agentic transactions.
• The speakers argue agentic commerce may be better suited for blockchain-based systems.
• Context manipulation and agent-to-agent fraud are emerging risks in the new paradigm.