We found an area where shopping agents fall short.

Paper · 2026

Evidence-bound policy authorization for agentic commerce

Rohan Khanna, Hadrien Padilla, Noah Edmunds

AI shopping agents can approve a purchase under return terms the store never offered. A store lists several ways to return an item, each with its own fee, window and refund. An agent asked for a free return refunded to the card takes “free” from one option and “refunded to the card” from another, and says yes. We call this route mixing. We describe an authorization layer that keeps each route separate, marks every fact true, false or unknown with its source, and signs the decisions it allows, and we test it on real purchases.