AI in action · Regulation
A Fed Governor's Three Questions Before an AI Agent Can Spend Your Money
In a September speech, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller separated AI agents that help you shop from agents that pay for you, and named the problems the second kind has to solve first: authentication, liability and fraud.
Speaking at the Sibos banking conference in Miami on September 29, 2026, Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller set out how he thinks about payments made by AI agents — the same kind of software that brokers are now connecting to trading accounts.
He drew a line between two models. In agent-assisted commerce the agent searches and recommends, but the person decides and pays. In agent-delegated commerce the person gives the agent authority to shop and pay within limits, and the agent acts on its own. The second, he said, carries more risk of unintended purchases and needs stronger trust mechanisms and guardrails.
Three problems follow from delegation. Authentication: the question moves from whether a buyer is allowed to pay to whether an agent has the authority to pay on the buyer's behalf, which Waller said "will require new authentication approaches." Liability: who bears the loss when an agent makes a wrong purchase — existing e-commerce frameworks could be adapted, he suggested, and technical standards could record what the buyer intended and what the agent did. Fraud: controls built around human behaviour may not work for agents, so "fraud models and rules will need to be recalibrated to account for agent payment patterns."
Waller was careful to say that the views were his own and that the Fed's role, for now, is to convene and observe; he hosted an industry roundtable on agentic commerce in May. The protocols are being written by card networks, payment providers and technology firms, and he raised the question of whether they will be open or closed systems.
The parallel with trading is direct. Robinhood's agentic accounts, Coinbase's and eToro's agents are agent-delegated systems for buying securities rather than goods, and the same three questions apply: how does the broker know the agent is authorised, who pays for its mistakes, and can fraud systems tell an agent's trades from a hijacked account's? Waller's speech is the clearest statement yet that a central bank is thinking about the answers.
Sources: Federal Reserve Board — Speech by Governor Waller on payments in the age of AI agents (Sep 29, 2026); Forkast — The Fed just named the three walls standing between AI agents and your wallet