Dan Robinson
RT @AlexanderGrieve: Personal agents are everywhere (Muse! Instinct! Hermes! GrokBot! Dots! Duet!).
And, increasingly, they're running into walls – similar walls to the ones banks threw up during the Open Banking fights of the past decade, as fintech users struggled to connect their apps to their bank-held financial data.
It's time for Open Agentic Commerce.
In Dodd-Frank Section 1033, the backbone of Open Banking, the definition of “consumer” reads: “an individual or an agent, trustee, or representative acting on behalf of an individual.” Congress obviously wasn’t contemplating AI agents when it wrote Dodd-Frank — but technology changing doesn’t obviate the underlying principle: consumers should be able to choose who, or what, transacts on their behalf.
Banks and companies like Amazon have real, legitimate concerns about agents becoming vectors for fraud or unauthorized transactions. But those are arguments for building portals for secure access, not for prohibiting agents altogether. Open Banking offers a useful lesson here, in that secure, standardized interfaces are preferable to forcing third parties into credential sharing or screen scraping.
We propose some basic guidance that relevant regulators (FTC, OCC, CFPB) could consider to help the market to coalesce around open norms before incumbents obtain sufficient lock-in, freezing the current landscape to their advantage.
With standards like these established, agents can make decisions that better serve the consumer, and will index on things like quality or price, rather than being funneled into a constrained set of options.
The push for Open Banking resulted in better experiences and lower prices for consumers. As agents become principal commercial actors, it is imperative that we lay the groundwork now so that an agent acting on your behalf is equally capable – if not more so – of delivering value and cost savings to you as you would be acting on your own.
Read our proposal below:
0130464
