Agentic Commerce: Legal and Compliance Checkpoints for Consumer Facing Platforms

How AI Shopping Agents Are Changing Consumer Commerce

Following our earlier article on agent-to-agent payment infrastructure, this article looks at the legal and compliance issues emerging in agentic commerce. Currently, AI shopping agents do more than assist users: they can search for products, compare offers, make selections, and in some cases complete purchases on a consumer’s behalf.

For consumer facing platforms, that creates a practical legal challenge. Online stores and marketplaces are no longer dealing only with human users moving through a conventional checkout flow. They may increasingly need to interact with non-human systems while still ensuring that contract formation, mandatory disclosures, payment controls, and consumer protection requirements remain effective. This article highlights the main checkpoints platforms should consider as agent-driven transactions become more common.

Why Platforms Need to Rethink Consent and Contract Formation

The first major issue is a user’s consent and contract formation. Any platform operator will generally want its terms to govern use of the platform and the transaction taking place on it. In the online environment, this has long been achieved through click-wrap agreements, where a human user is presented with terms and affirmatively indicates acceptance, usually by clicking “I agree” or taking a similar step. That model is well established and is generally enforceable across many jurisdictions.

That framework becomes far less straightforward when an AI agent interacts with that consent pop-up. An agent has no independent legal personality. It cannot form legal intent in its own right, and it cannot itself consent to contractual terms. More importantly, in practice, the human user may never actually review the terms. The platform may face arguments in a legal dispute that the user itself never consented to the terms and that they should not be enforceable against the user.

In most countries, this question is typically analysed through the law of agency. A user will only be bound where the agent acts within a legitimate mandate that can be demonstrated. However, this is questionable, because many existing legal doctrines on agency were developed around human or legal person actors, and their application to autonomous software agents remains unsettled.

To address this, platforms may need to redesign the transaction flow. One possible step may be to incorporate the key terms and conditions, together with other legally important provisions, directly into the final checkout page. This may be particularly relevant for higher-value transactions, where there is a greater likelihood that the user will personally enter the checkout flow and complete at least part of the process themselves. From the platform’s perspective, that kind of clear disclosures can materially strengthen its position in the event of a later legal dispute. Examples of such provisions may include payment timing, delivery restrictions, or subscription renewal terms clauses.

Why Machine Readable Interfaces Matter in Agentic Commerce

A second challenge is that AI agents do not interact with websites in the same way humans do. They do not visually scan a page, interpret layout, or infer meaning from design cues. They consume data. If pricing terms, return policies, restrictions, and product conditions are improperly structured, an agent may misunderstand the offer or fail to act within the user’s instructions. This creates legal and operational risk for both platform and user.

As a result, platforms may need to make their commercial and legal architecture more machine-readable. In practical terms, this means structuring product information, such as pricing, delivery and return windows, product restrictions, and warranty information, in formats that AI agents can reliably interpret. It may no longer be sufficient to rely on conventional Terms and Conditions and interface notices written primarily for human readers. Platforms should consider whether key commercial and legal terms need to be presented in a clearer, more standardised, and machine-readable format.

From SEO and discoverability perspective, this also aligns with the broader trend toward AI-facing optimisation, where structured content becomes increasingly important not only for search engines but for autonomous systems acting on behalf of users.

Consumer Protection Rules Still Apply to AI Agent Transactions

Consumer protection remains central. It may be tempting to assume that the platform’s disclosure obligations can be relaxed because of AI agents. However, that approach is unlikely to hold. In our view, where the human principal is a consumer, that person remains the consumer for legal purposes even if an AI agent handles the transaction interface on their behalf.

This is especially important in jurisdictions with strong consumer protection legislation, such as the European Union, where rules like the Digital Services Act prohibit manipulative design and dark patterns. A platform cannot lawfully exploit the way an AI agent processes information in order to sidestep disclosures, weaken cancellation rights, or obscure legally required warnings. If the human is not directly present at checkout, the platform must still ensure that all mandatory pre-contractual information, withdrawal rights, product warnings, and other statutory disclosures are transmitted to the agent in a reliable form. The assumption may be that a properly designed agent will relay that information to the user, but the platform’s duty to provide it remains unchanged.

Over time, this may also influence how platforms and vendors design the purchase fulfilment stage. For example, they may move toward presenting key disclaimers, important contractual terms, or confirmation steps more actively at delivery or at another point where the human user is certain to interact directly, rather than only through the agent.

How to Distinguish Legitimate AI Shopping Agents from Malicious Bots

Security and identity verification create another major checkpoint. With more than half (51%) of internet traffic now generated by non-human users, platforms face a difficult distinction: how can they tell the difference between a legitimate AI shopping assistant acting under consumer authority and a malicious bot attempting fraud, abuse, or unauthorised access? This is not simply a technical issue. For example, malicious bots may attempt to mimic legitimate AI shopping agents and use stolen card credentials to complete transactions.

In the short term, many platforms may need to keep a human in the loop for the most sensitive stage of the transaction, for example by requiring two-factor authentication or biometric approval before final payment is processed. Over time, more robust and trusted infrastructure may come into play. One current example is Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, which aims to verify that an agent is genuine, authorised, and acting with legitimate purchasing intent.

A Practical Compliance Checklist for Consumer Facing Platforms

In practical terms, platforms preparing for agentic commerce may wish to consider several early implementation steps:

• redesigning checkout flows so that prices, delivery details, and key contractual provisions appear clearly at the final stage of purchase or delivery, where direct user involvement is more likely;
• product information, return rules, and Terms & Conditions may need to be structured in a machine-readable format so that AI agents can interpret them correctly;
• ensure that mandatory consumer disclosures, including pre-contractual information, and product warnings, can be transmitted to the agent in a reliable way;
• introduce stronger verification measures to distinguish legitimate shopping agents from malicious bots. In the near term, this may include keeping a human in the loop for final stages of the transaction through two-factor authentication or biometric approval.

The Next Step for Consumer Facing Platforms

Agentic commerce does not remove the legal duties that already apply to digital platforms. It changes how those duties must be operationalised. Platforms will need to think more carefully about contract formation, consumer disclosures, structured product information, and how to verify that an AI agent is legitimate and properly authorised.

Businesses that prepare early will be better placed to support agent driven transactions without weakening consumer protection. For platforms, the immediate task is not to redesign the entire commerce stack, but to identify where existing checkout, disclosure, and verification models assume a human user and where those assumptions may no longer hold.

How Aurum Can Help

At Aurum, we help businesses address legal risk at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and emerging commerce models. If you are operating a platform, developing AI agents, or enabling agent-driven transactions, we can help you assess the legal and compliance issues that may arise. Our support in this area includes drafting platform Terms & Conditions, advising on checkout design, allocation of liability between actors involved, and consumer protection.

You may wish to refer to our earlier article on Moltbook, which outlines the broader context and practical implications of interacting with AI agents.

Contact us to discuss your specific needs and how we can support your objectives while managing associated risks.