Banks block AI agent purchases while startups demonstrate workarounds

Tools for Humanity CPO @tiagosada explains why banks and Amazon risk losing customers by blocking AI agents, and how giving bots "power of attorney" could change that: "JPMorgan Chase just announced, and I believe Citigroup or Bank of America yesterday, they’re fully gonna block out bots. That’s the safe way to go, but consumers now expect to use our agents. We’re just gonna start using other banks that let us." "Paul Graham was tweeting, I think this is the first opening to compete with Amazon in its whole history, because they’re blocking agents." "The answer is delegating your proof of human to your bot. Almost like giving your bot power of attorney. It shows up to Amazon and says, I am a bot, but I am representing a human, and not just a random human. I’m representing Tiago." "If…

Self Labs CEO @RegenRene reveals how his team got AI agents buying products on Amazon despite its restrictions on agent purchases: "There was this big story of Amazon blocking agent purchases. We actually got it to work through Agent Vault. We haven’t publicly talked about it because it’s not been reliably working, sometimes it gets caught. But in the beta we’ve had some success doing agent purchases." "For Halloween I decided to dress up as Andre Agassi from the 1990 French Open. My agents came back with nine different things across nine different sites. I had my agent, through Agent Vault, purchase all of them, and it just worked." "Using my credit cards on all the different sites, asking me every time before making the final purchase, and then boom." @selfxyz

Pretty much every digitally accessible service will probably need to update its terms and services, similar to how Google is updating it for Google Workspace. I now also wonder when AI agents will make it into the broader regulatory system - they will surely have to! (If nothing else, updating on what it means when the service is accessed with an AI, on behalf of a user)