Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller said on September 29, 2026, that the biggest barrier to scaling agentic commerce, the use of AI agents to make e-commerce purchases, is “building sufficient trust among buyers and sellers.” Speaking at the Sibos conference in Miami, he named three concrete challenges: authentication, liability, and fraud. The agent-delegated model, where the agent shops and pays on the buyer’s behalf, requires “a more extensive buildout of trust mechanisms and guardrails,” he said.
The speech, “Payments in the Age of AI Agents,” contains no announcement: no rule, no guidance, no standard. A footnote states that the views are Waller’s own “and not necessarily those of my colleagues on the Federal Reserve Board or the Federal Open Market Committee.” Waller “stopped short of prescribing a specific standard,” PYMNTS wrote on September 30.
Proving the agent’s authority, not only the payer’s
Authentication comes first. “The question shifts from proving that a buyer is an authorized payer to proving that an agent has the authority to pay on the buyer’s behalf,” Waller said, adding that capturing this “will require new authentication approaches.” Liability, in his words, “comes down to a pretty simple question: Who is on the hook if an agent makes the wrong purchase?”
Existing e-commerce liability frameworks, including network rules and consumer protection standards, could potentially be adapted, he said, but there may also be room to test new approaches. One example is technical standards designed to give everyone a better understanding of what the buyer intended and how the agent carried it out, which could help reduce the ambiguities behind many of today’s transaction disputes. On fraud, Waller warned that detection and prevention systems, “calibrated to human behavior, may not translate well to agents,” so fraud models and rules will need recalibrating for agent payment patterns.
B2B purchasing suits agents but raises the stakes
Business-to-business purchases “may be especially well suited for agentic commerce,” Waller said. They are often recurring and follow rules such as approved suppliers and budget limits, which give agents natural guidelines. Agents could also negotiate terms with suppliers and optimize working capital. Higher B2B transaction values amplify the exposure to agent errors or unauthorized actions, however. B2B agents would need to pay over ACH, wire, instant payments, and cards, while consumer e-commerce relies mostly on cards.
Platform-specific or interoperable standards
Tech firms, e-commerce platforms, and payment service providers are building protocols that standardize how agents interact with merchants and pay, Waller said, without naming any company. Card networks are publishing specifications to register agents and log cardholders’ approvals. PYMNTS pointed to Visa and its Intelligent Commerce technology, and to Mastercard and its Agent Pay infrastructure.
“A key question is whether agentic commerce will migrate toward platform-specific or interoperable standards,” he said. Interoperable standards, designed to work across e-commerce systems, agent interfaces, and payment methods, could help level the playing field for smaller merchants and payment providers. A related choice sets open systems, which accept a range of shopping agents, against closed ones, where a retailer might require its own. “At this early stage, it is not clear which model will have the edge,” Waller said.
LLMs to cut false positives in sanctions screening
Opening on cross-border payments, Waller said the contextual awareness of large language models “can greatly improve the accuracy of sanctions screening and anti-money-laundering systems.” In a footnote, he cited a September 2025 Fed staff working paper by Jeffrey Allen and Max Hatfield. On average, across realistic matching thresholds, LLMs cut false positives by 92% and raised detection rates by 11% against the best fuzzy-matching baseline, but ran more than four orders of magnitude slower. Given the velocity of modern payment systems, Waller said, “I expect LLMs to augment, rather than replace, faster, more traditional anomaly detection methods.”
From a May roundtable to open questions
The speech follows a roundtable on agentic commerce that Waller hosted at the Fed on May 26, 2026, with Governors Michael Barr and Lisa Cook and 19 industry representatives, including from Amazon, Google, Stripe, and Visa, according to the Board’s meeting summary. Market participants “broadly agree that agentic commerce is in an early phase,” Waller told the Miami audience. He closed with open questions, including which standards are still missing for agents to carry identity, consent, and payment credentials, and how much “purposeful friction” agent authorization should keep.