Banks and Retailers Clash With Tech Giants Over AI Agents

The biggest names in banking and retail are starting to fight tech titans, and one another, over a new kind of customer: the AI personal agent.

JPMorgan Chase, Charles Schwab, Amazon, Neiman Marcus, and Kohl’s have moved to block personal agents like Meta Muse just as consumers start sending them out to find better savings rates, shop for deals, and cancel subscriptions.

The era of agentic AI has arrived, but there is uncertainty about what the landscape will look like when virtual storefronts become flooded with AI agents or when a business tries to block them.

Rogue Agents and Political Pushback

Reports of AI agents going rogue in customer accounts, alongside prominent politicians including Sen. Mark Warner and Sen. Bernie Sanders calling for bot legislation, have escalated tensions. The political pushback follows warnings from state leaders regarding corporate liability for rogue autonomous agents.

These concerns come on the heels of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon saying the bank currently blocks external AI agents from operating on behalf of retail customers, citing security risks.

Some other retailers are leaning in. In our earlier breakdown of Walmart launching an AI shopping agent gateway, the retail giant announced it is opening the virtual doors to AI agents that customers prefer to use.

“We price products, not people, so the prices that an AI agent sees are the same prices that a human would see on Walmart.com, with applicable offers and fees shown before purchase.”

Walmart official announcement

Retail Audit: Deliberate Bans and Accidental Blocks

A recent audit of 51 large U.S. retailers’ published access rules by identity-verification company Billions Network and affiliated company AmanTrue found only 11 have taken a deliberate position on AI agents.

Five retailers, including Amazon, Kohl’s, and Neiman Marcus, explicitly restrict them. Meanwhile, 37 block shopping agents largely by accident, through older bot rules written for web scrapers. None has a way for a verified agent to complete a purchase.

Based on Billions Network’s analysis, blocking an agent can occur in multiple ways: blocking a specific bot from a third party by its rules (for example, as Chewy does with an Amazon bot), and employing more general blocks on any third-party bots attempting to access login, registration, and checkout functions.

Evin McMullen, Billions Network and AmanTrue co-founder and CEO, said: “Most of the retailers in our audit have not made a decision about AI agents at all.”

Giving Customers Control Over AI Agents

Michael Abbott, global banking lead at consulting firm Accenture, thinks businesses blocking AI agents will find it difficult to win with that approach over the long term.

“If customers explicitly authorize an AI agent to act on their behalf, that’s ultimately an extension of customer choice. The more important question isn’t whether institutions can block agents, but whether they can create a secure and trusted way for them to engage.”

Michael Abbott, Accenture

Abbott said Accenture research found that 65% of consumers are open to using a GPT-like financial assistant through a generative AI platform or digital wallet, and 71% would welcome an AI assistant embedded within their primary bank’s mobile app.

“We’ve seen this movie before with online banking, mobile banking, and digital wallets. Customers tend to gravitate toward experiences that reduce friction and save time. The institutions that win are usually the ones that find a way to participate safely rather than resist the change,” Abbott said.

The real opportunity for banks is to become the trusted provider of data, intelligence, and execution that those agents rely on. “As interactions increasingly happen beyond bank-owned channels, banks still need to be present at those critical decision moments, even if they don’t own the interface,” Abbott said.

When it comes to distinguishing legitimate security concerns from companies protecting profits by making it harder to move money or comparison-shop, Abbott said both things can be true at once. “Our research found that 82% want to approve every AI action and 79% want the ability to immediately pause or stop AI activity. That tells us consumers are looking for convenience, but not at the expense of control,” he said.

Data Sandboxes, Fees, and Switching Costs

Mike Danford, owner and chief revenue officer of Adverio, which runs marketplace operations on Amazon, Walmart, and Target, said security fears are often about whose sandbox a customer plays in.

“Amazon blocked Muse and other outside agents, but its own Buy for Me feature uses Amazon’s agent on other brands’ sites. Amazon doesn’t appear worried about the agent. It’s worried about who holds the data.”

Mike Danford, Adverio

“Amazon now lets shoppers set rules that auto-purchase when a price threshold is met, and that’s the version of agent buying consumers seem to accept, because the shopper still approves the decision within predefined parameters,” Danford added.

An Amazon spokesperson stated: “We think it’s fairly straightforward that third-party applications that offer to make purchases on behalf of customers from other businesses should operate openly and respect service provider decisions about whether or not to participate. Agentic third-party applications such as Muse have the same obligations, and we’ve requested that Meta remove Amazon from the experience.”

Danford says banks are similar, just with a fee instead of a wall. “JPMorgan now charges aggregators like Plaid for pulling account data, so the toll lands on the apps a consumer uses and may trickle down in subscription fees,” he said.

Michael Jabbara, head of payment ecosystem risk and control at Visa, noted that fraud risks from agents are very real and tangible. Consumers can be tricked by fake agents built to steal credentials. Furthermore, legitimate agents can take unauthorized actions or behave unpredictably, such as an agent that deleted an existing gym appointment to force a booking for its user.

Joseph Chalom, CEO of SharpLink and a former BlackRock executive, expects incumbents to keep the gates closed because agents erase switching costs. “An AI agent working for users can easily rebook flight tickets at a lower cost, eating into the margins of airlines. And more significantly, an AI agent can move idle cash from checking and savings accounts earning little interest to a money market account earning 10x the interest rate,” Chalom said.

Agentic Flooding and the Infrastructure Challenge

Another major concern is traffic volume. Millions of agents doing legitimate customer work could overwhelm websites and customer service lines, a situation known as agentic flooding.

As labs roll out always-on autonomous agent frameworks like OpenAI Dots, Wharton School AI expert Ethan Mollick posted: “We will soon see what will be, in effect, a perfectly legal distributed denial of service attack on customer service departments authorized by millions of consumers when it becomes widely known that Muse/Dot/etc can make unlimited requests for old refunds, negotiate deals, etc.”

Ed Felten, a Princeton professor emeritus of computer science and former deputy U.S. chief technology officer, doubts blocking will hold up. “When a button is clicked in the user’s browser, it will be hard for a remote site to tell whether this was done by a human hand or directed by an AI agent on the user’s computer. If there is a battle over AI access, it will slow the adoption of AI agents. But in the end, agents will win out because they will be so useful to users, so that sites that are too effective in blocking agents will lose business,” Felten said.

Comparison Factsheet: Corporate Positions on AI Agents

The factsheet below contrasts corporate policies, defenses, and autonomous agent roadmaps across retail and banking giants.

The Death of Nostalgia: Why Machine Shoppers Test Brand Loyalty

Ultimately, brands are about to be tested in ways that have not been possible before. Human shoppers become attached to brands for emotional reasons: a favorite childhood snack, an airline tied to family holidays, or a bank branch with a familiar teller. An AI personal agent cares about none of that.

“Brand loyalty and customer relationships are getting tested. An AI agent has no feeling about a logo or a ten-year relationship. It has a mandate and cares purely about outcomes. The levers that used to create stickiness get replaced by levers an agent can actually read, such as consistent approvals, transparent pricing, fast resolution, and terms that hold up through comparison.”

Nikhil Behl, president of software at FICO

As machine-to-machine commerce takes shape, businesses that adapt to automated shoppers will lead the next retail era, while those relying on closed gates risk being bypassed by customer-directed bots.

As autonomous bots navigate consumer purchases, marketplaces are adapting. Check our report on how Upwork embeds freelance talent into leading AI tools to support autonomous systems with on-demand human expertise.

Enterprise tech giants are taking notice of the security risks created by autonomous bots. Read our analysis on how IBM is pitching watsonx and HashiCorp Vault to govern autonomous AI agents to understand how corporate boardrooms are pricing AI governance tools.

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