Asked to find eggs. It bought them.
A journalist testing an AI shopping agent found it had paid about $31 for a dozen eggs, delivery included, without asking him first.
Source: Washington Post via ADN ↗Agents are getting cards, wallets and the right to spend. Rabbitnose is building the check every agent payment passes first: your rules and the law, before a single euro moves.
A familiar story
Smart, eager, fast. Handed the company card to “just sort out the software”.
Three renewals. One of them paid twice. A new supplier nobody had heard of.
Finance finds out from the statement. Nobody was checking. Nobody had the time.
Now give that intern a thousand hands and no need to sleep. That's an AI agent with a budget.
Same five payments. Each one checked before the money moved: two go through, two are stopped, one waits for a person. Always with a reason.
It's already happening
Real cases. Every one of them is a check that wasn't there. Business email scams alone led to $55 billion in reported losses over ten years, according to the FBI.
A journalist testing an AI shopping agent found it had paid about $31 for a dozen eggs, delivery included, without asking him first.
Source: Washington Post via ADN ↗An AI left to run a small office shop handed out discounts, stocked tungsten cubes nobody needed and ended up losing money.
Source: Anthropic, Project Vend ↗A tribunal ruled that an airline must honour a refund policy its own chatbot made up. The bot said it; the company paid.
Source: Times Colonist ↗A news anchor saying "Alexa ordered me a dollhouse" on air set off the same order attempts in viewers' living rooms.
Source: FOX13 ↗An employee of a global engineering firm wired about $25M after a video call with "executives" who were all deepfakes.
Source: Business Insider ↗A global bank meant to send an interest payment and wired lenders the full loan instead. Getting it back took two years in court.
Source: Business Standard ↗Why now
Agents can pay. Card networks and payment providers are opening their rails to AI agents.
Rules don't travel with them. Spending policy, approval chains and country-specific regulation live in people's heads and PDFs.
Someone still answers for it. When an agent pays the wrong supplier, the wrong amount or the wrong country, it's finance and compliance who explain it.
The idea
Before paying, the agent sends the payment it intends to make.
Company policy, approvals and the rules of each country involved.
Allowed, sent to a person, or blocked, always with a reason.
Who it's for
Let agents buy, book and pay without giving up sign-off. Your policy holds, whoever presses pay.
Ship agents that enterprises can trust with real money, with the controls their finance teams will ask for.
Agent-initiated payments are landing on your rails. Know there was a rule and a reason behind each one.
Principles
When anything is uncertain, a payment goes to a person. Never silently through.
Every yes, no and maybe comes with a reason people and auditors can read.
Designed for European data protection and financial regulation from day one.
Only what a payment decision needs. Nothing more, kept no longer than necessary.
One policy for every agent and platform a company uses, not one per vendor.
Your teams set the rules and own the hard calls. Rabbitnose does the checking.
Early access
We are looking for a small group of finance teams and agent platforms to shape Rabbitnose before launch.
hello@rabbitnose.com