Merchants losing revenue as fraud systems misclassify AI shopping agents as malicious bots
As agentic commerce scales, fraud systems built for human behaviour are increasingly misclassifying legitimate AI transactions as malicious bots.
Card disputes vendor Chargebacks911, says hat the diconnect between AI shopping agents and fraud detection systems is creating a significant and largely overlooked risk for merchants, triggering false declines and revenue loss at scale.
The warning comes as agentic commerce, in which AI systems autonomously search, compare, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, moves rapidly from concept to commercial reality. Visa and Mastercard are already piloting agent-initiated transactions with major banking partners, and platforms including Perplexity, Walmart, and Amazon are enabling AI agents to transact directly on consumers’ behalf.
Yet as this shift accelerates, fraud detection systems have not kept pace. According to Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report, 51% of internet traffic is now generated by bots, of which 37% is considered malicious. Today’s AI shopping agents operate within browsers, generating traffic patterns that appear increasingly human, and in doing so are triggering fraud systems designed for a world in which a human being was always behind the transaction.
Chargebacks911 believes the implications for merchants as twofold. While industry attention has focused primarily on the risk of disputed AI-initiated transactions, the reverse problem, blocking legitimate agentic purchases before they complete, represents an equally significant and more immediate threat to revenue. A false decline carries no chargeback, but the cost in lost sales, damaged brand trust, and reduced visibility to AI agents is immediate and growing.
“The fraud systems most merchants rely on today were built to detect bad human behaviour. They were not designed for a world where a legitimate AI agent and a malicious bot look almost identical,” says Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of Chargebacks911. “As agentic commerce scales, merchants face a clear choice: adapt their detection and evidence infrastructure now, or watch a growing share of legitimate revenue get declined by their own systems.”
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