The answer is delegated authorization — a system where you grant an agent a scoped set of permissions in advance, much like handing someone a signed check with a spending limit rather than your full bank card.

When you shop online yourself, retailers trust you because you logged in, solved a CAPTCHA, and clicked 'Buy.' An AI agent bypasses all of that, arriving at checkout programmatically with no human in the loop. To a server, a legitimate shopping agent and a malicious bot look identical.

Emerging protocols like OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google's Universal Commerce Protocol address this using OAuth-style identity tokens that tell a retailer who the agent is, which customer it represents, and what it's allowed to buy. Without that infrastructure, merchants have no reliable way to tell the two apart — which is why, as The Verge reported this week, some retailers are welcoming agents while others are actively blocking them.