Major Banks Are Warning Regulators About AI Shopping Bots

Bank of America, NatWest, ING, Capital One and other major lenders have jointly warned that AI shopping agents are outpacing fraud and privacy protections, calling for mandatory disclosure and transparency rules just days after Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from its own retail site.

Sep 22, 2026

Your bank is now officially worried about letting an AI do your shopping. A coalition including Bank of America, NatWest, ING, Capital One, New Zealand's ASB Bank and Commonwealth Bank of Australia released a joint report Tuesday warning that AI-powered shopping agents are creating scam, fraud and data-privacy risks that current industry standards simply haven't caught up with.

The banks were careful to frame this as a speed problem rather than outright opposition — customers, they say, are genuinely enthusiastic about letting agents shop for them. The report's own language captures the tension: "Consumers are unclear if AI will act in their interests... They are not sure whether they will be protected or who they will need to go to if things go wrong." A few specifics from the report stand out:

Flagged risks include agents entering customers' card details directly into websites or steering shoppers toward payment methods offering weaker fraud protection
The group wants regulators to require mandatory disclosure whenever an AI agent is party to a transaction, plus clearer insight into how agents reach their decisions
British retailer John Lewis said AI-agent-driven searches rose to 2.5% of total traffic in September, up from just 0.3% a year earlier

The timing lines up almost exactly with a live example of the problem the banks are describing. Just days earlier, Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from shopping on its site, citing undisclosed browsing and credential-handling concerns — precisely the kind of unclear liability and consent issue this report is asking regulators to formalize rules around.

With OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta all promoting AI agents as shopping tools and retailers racing to shape what those agents recommend, the banks' core ask — disclosure, transparency, and interoperability standards — is essentially a bid to get a seat at the table before, rather than after, agentic commerce becomes the default way people buy things online.