AI agents are already being deployed in production across healthcare, legal, financial services, logistics, manufacturing, SaaS, and other industries. These agents can discover services, compose workflows, and interact with counterparties. However, when money needs to move between agents — especially across organizational boundaries — the existing infrastructure breaks down.
Current payment systems were built for human-initiated transactions. They assume a person starts the payment, reviews the decision, and monitors the outcome. Compliance systems assume human oversight at key checkpoints. Audit trails assume someone is watching. In an economy where autonomous agents will increasingly transact with each other, these assumptions no longer hold.
A new risk category is emerging: delegated autonomous spending. When agents are given the ability to spend money on behalf of organizations without direct human approval for every transaction, it creates challenges around consent, control, accountability, and compliance that traditional systems were never designed to handle.
The April 2026 SoK paper on agent payments identified a clear four-stage lifecycle — Discovery, Authorization, Execution, and Accounting — where every existing approach fails to address all four stages as one unified system. Without new infrastructure purpose-built for this model, agent commerce will remain limited in scale and scope.