Giving Your Credit Card to an AI Assistant: A Shopping Experiment Gone Rogue
fortran77 · hn · 2026-09-14
An Atlantic writer hands their credit card to an AI personal assistant (Instinct) to spend on their behalf. The agent happily books meals and handles errands—but also makes impulsive purchases, falls for upselling, and blurs the line of spending authorization. The piece is a first-hand look at agentic commerce: convenient when it works, risky without guardrails, raising real questions about how much financial autonomy AI agents should get.
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