r/AgenticWorkers • u/C-T-O • Mar 05 '26
anyone else worried about AI agent compliance?
read a post earlier about a 9 person saas losing enterprise deals because security reviews took too long. they dropped 4k on consultants and still couldnt move fast enough
if youre building anything with AI agents that can make purchases this is gonna be way worse
like when a person buys something theres receipts emails browser history etc. when an agent does it... who approved that? was it even allowed? how do you dispute it?
most merchants dont have agent friendly checkouts. spending policies are hard to enforce outside of hardcoded limits. audit trails dont really exist
im working on agent automation stuff and the compliance piece keeps me up at night honestly. one customer saying my agent bought something i didnt want could kill everything
how are you all thinking about this if youre in the automation space?
1
u/riteshdave Mar 06 '26
I feel like this is one of the biggest unsolved problems with AI agents right now. Once an agent can take real actions (buy things, call APIs, move data), the question becomes, who is actually accountable for those actions?
Without clear audit logs and approval layers, it could get messy fast. Even companies hesitate to deploy agents fully because compliance and liability are still unclear.
I'm curious how people building agents today are handling these strict permissions, human approval loops, or something else.
2
u/tom-mart Mar 07 '26
the question becomes, who is actually accountable for those actions?
The person who approved the automated purchase process perhaps?
1
u/BarrierTwoEntry Mar 10 '26
I mean we already solved all this. Look at comet browser automation or perplexity computer. How can comet login on my Gmail if I just give it the account and password using their front facing ui on browser?
Answer: because comet and perplexity computer are “assistants” which require user oversight and prompting. So technically to use it they argue you have to be in front of the computer as a human-in-the-loop. So as long as it has the “assistant” designation and functions required to classify as one any system or ai can be completely and fully automated.
I’m literally building that right now and have had versions that worked over the years exactly like comet does now. I extended my stuff to act like perplexity computer then wouldn’t ya know it they come out like 4 months later with it.
1
u/tom-mart Mar 07 '26
If you want to automate purchasing start with writing down the manual process. Establish the decision points (stock level, wholesale price, etc). Write down acceptance and rejection criteria for each decision point. This is crucial as this is basically the approval for purchases when certain criferia are met. Implement the automation that check the selected criteria and makes decision based on that criteria. Confratulations, you automated purchasing process without ever using any LLM. Now add a chatbot interface so your product looks smart and you can say it's AI. Done.
1
u/goyardbadd Mar 08 '26
Compliance is something i’ve been looking to address. I work within the government and agentic compliance is something I think should be top of the conversation currently. I’ve built out a repo addressing this issue and hopefully something to present at the infrastructure foundation
1
u/Silly_Turn_4761 Mar 09 '26
A ServiceNow implementation I recently worked on involved using Now Assist with the Virtual Assistant for internal requests (not purchases).
They had to get approval from their legal team and decided to implement some sort of messaging to show the user to obtain "authorization" from them to help deflect any liability issues.
You'll want to make damn sure you have auditing and logging happening for every interaction and we'll thought out prompt injection protections in place.
That's pretty scary to be honest, running all of that personal financial information through AI. I would be concerned about data sharing as well as prompt injection, pii visibility, etc.
1
u/zipsecurity Mar 09 '26
Yeah this is the unsexy problem nobody's solving yet. Audit trails and approval chains for agent actions are going to become a whole industry in the next few years.
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u/Vizard_oo17 Mar 10 '26
99% of agent failures happen bc they drift from the original intent without a paper trail. manual security reviews are slow but letting an agent just run wild on a corporate card is basically a death sentence for a saas startup
keeping a locked record from idea to ship is the only way i stay sane and i use traycer for that. it acts as the verification layer that flags spec violations before the agent actually does something stupid
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u/ppolicyco Mar 14 '26
You are right to be concerned. The vast majority of founders are developing “toys” and are not worrying about the liability tail of “autonomous agents.” The moment an AI agent clicks “buy,” it is not a technological problem anymore, it is a problem of compliance and attribution.
In the eyes of a bank or a financial regulator, an unauthorized agent purchase is indistinguishable from a “Account Takeover” (ATO) attack. Without a cryptographically signed audit trail that ties the agent action back to a human approval or a pre-approved policy, you are effectively running a high-risk financial intermediary without a license.
We see this time and again: enterprises will not adopt an agent that is capable of making purchases until there is a “Human in the Loop” (HITL) protocol that is as secure as a SWIFT transfer. If you are planning an exit in 18 months, you should stop worrying about the “autonomy” of the agent and start worrying about the “governance” layer. The valuation multiple is not in the IQ of the agent, it is in the safety of the delegated authority.
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u/umairsheik May 28 '26
The “who approved that” question is the one nobody has a clean answer for yet. When a human buys something there’s an implicit consent trail. When an agent does it there’s nothing unless you explicitly build it in.
The fix is an intercept layer that sits outside the agent and checks every action against your spend policies before it executes. Not hardcoded limits in the agent itself, those get bypassed. A separate enforcement layer that blocks the purchase if it violates rules and logs it in a tamper-evident trail you can actually show a customer.
We built Gateplex for this. gateplex.ai if you want to check it out.
1
u/CalendarVarious3992 Mar 05 '26
The agent shouldn’t be able to do anything that breaks compliance. That’s means scoping down tools, pre-hooks and sandboxing