AI Agents Raise a New Question: Who Authorized the Recurring Payment?

AI agents are getting closer to buying things for consumers. Now the payments industry is beginning to work through a harder problem: What happens when an agent makes another purchase later, without the customer sitting at checkout?

EMVCo, the global technical body collectively owned by American Express, Discover, JCB, Mastercard, UnionPay and Visa, released a draft framework Sept. 1 for card payments made by AI agents on behalf of consumers. One of the situations it specifically identifies is recurring purchases.

If a consumer gives an AI agent permission to make purchases over time, merchants and payment providers need to know what the customer actually allowed the agent to do. They also need to know whether a later purchase still falls within those instructions.

The EMVCo draft does not create any new requirements for subscription merchants today. It is open for public comment through Sept. 30 and could eventually lead to new technical specifications.

But the work puts recurring purchases squarely into the discussion about how agentic payments will operate.

When the Customer Isn't at Checkout

Traditional subscription billing usually starts with a customer agreeing to an offer and authorizing the business to charge them again.

Agentic recurring commerce could work differently. A customer might tell an AI agent:

Keep ordering my dog food when I'm running low, but don't spend more than $80 a month.

Or:

Renew my software subscriptions unless the price goes up more than 10%.

This may not look like a traditional subscription. Instead of the merchant scheduling the next charge, the AI agent could decide when to make another purchase within rules set by the customer.

The timing could change. So could the amount. And the customer might later change or revoke those instructions.

EMVCo says situations such as recurring purchases and cumulative spending budgets may require a way to keep track of consumer intent over time. Its draft proposes something called Intent Services. In plain English, that would give authorized payment participants a common way to register and check what a consumer permitted before, during and after a transaction.

EMVCo is also considering future tools that could identify the AI agent involved and indicate that a transaction was initiated by an agent acting for a consumer. Those ideas are still being developed.

Merchants Need to Know Who Is Buying

For merchants, this becomes a very practical problem. A business needs to know whether an AI agent trying to make a purchase is legitimate and whether it is acting within the customer's instructions.

• Visa is working on its own Trusted Agent Protocol to help merchants recognize approved commerce agents instead of mistaking them for ordinary bots or malicious traffic.
• Mastercard is addressing another part of the problem through Verifiable Intent. Its approach is designed to connect the consumer's authorization, the instructions given to the AI agent and the purchase that follows.

If something goes wrong later, that record could help establish what the consumer told the agent it could do.

For merchants, the practical question is straightforward: Did my customer authorize this purchase? That becomes harder when one set of instructions can lead to purchases weeks or months later.

Insider Take

Subscription operators already work in a compliance environment increasingly focused on clear consent, recurring charges and a customer's ability to stop them. Agentic recurring commerce could complicate that model. A customer may give an AI agent rules and let the agent make future purchasing decisions instead of directly telling a merchant exactly what to buy and when.

The business still needs confidence that the resulting purchase is legitimate. If the customer changes the instruction, revokes the agent's authority or disputes a later transaction, there also needs to be a way to determine what the agent was allowed to do at that point in time.

EMVCo isn't creating a new subscription rule. What it is doing is putting the problem of ongoing authorization onto the card industry's technical agenda.

For subscription operators, the question to watch is becoming clear: What will count as proof that the customer authorized the recurring purchase?

As agentic commerce becomes recurring commerce, proving permission may become just as important as processing the payment.

Sources

• EMVCo: “EMVCo Requests Feedback on Framework for Secure, Interoperable and Scalable Card-Based Agentic Payments,” Sept. 1, 2026
• EMVCo: “EMV Agentic Payments - Framework for Specifications v1.0 DRAFT”
• EMVCo: “Overview of EMVCo”
• Mastercard: “When AI Starts Buying for You, Trust Becomes the Product,” March 5, 2026
• Visa: “Trusted Agent Protocol Specifications”