Retailers are racing to put AI agents in front of consumers — and they’ve quietly solved the question of who pays when those agents make mistakes. Spoiler: it’s you.

Target became the latest major retailer to update its terms of service to explicitly disclaim liability for its upcoming AI shopping agent. The update, discovered by Business Insider, covers Target’s Gemini-powered “Agentic Commerce Agent” — a virtual assistant designed to complete Target shopping runs autonomously on customers’ behalf.

The relevant language is blunt: any transaction performed by the AI agent is “considered a transaction authorized by you.” That’s the entire liability shield in one sentence. If the agent buys the wrong item, buys an expensive version of the right item without your explicit consent, or makes a purchase you didn’t intend — you authorized it.

What the Terms Actually Say

The updated ToS makes the consumer’s obligations explicit:

“You are responsible for reviewing activity performed by your Agentic Commerce Agent and for promptly notifying the Agentic Commerce Agent and Target of any activity you believe is unauthorized or outside the scope of permissions you approved.”

And then, in case the implication wasn’t clear enough:

“Target does not purport to guarantee the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, reliability, suitability, or availability of the Agentic Commerce Agent.”

Translation: Target is offering an AI agent that can spend your money, while contractually guaranteeing nothing about that agent’s accuracy or reliability, and placing the responsibility for monitoring its behavior on the customer.

The Double Standard Built Into Agentic Commerce

This pattern isn’t unique to Target. Futurism notes the same posture is appearing across major retailers — eager public announcements about AI innovation, paired with quietly updated ToS documents that shift all downside risk to consumers.

The structural problem is straightforward: retailers capture the upside of AI agents (increased conversion, higher basket sizes, reduced customer service load) while consumers absorb the downside (unexpected purchases, errors, the overhead of monitoring an AI on their behalf).

Compare this to how credit card fraud liability works: if someone uses your card without authorization, you’re protected. The merchant and card network absorb the risk. Now imagine a world where your bank updated its terms to say that any transaction initiated by its AI financial assistant is “considered a transaction authorized by you” — including ones made in error. That’s the contractual reality Target is now offering.

The Governance Question No One Has Answered

The deeper issue here is accountability — which is the same question Gartner’s Guardian Agents report raised last week, and the same question the Anthropic/DoD dispute centers on.

When an AI agent acts on your behalf and makes an error, who is responsible? For enterprises using agent tools internally, this question is governed by internal policy and vendor contracts. For consumers, it’s increasingly being answered by ToS updates that nobody reads until something goes wrong.

Target’s approach — authorize everything in advance, disclaim all accuracy guarantees, require the consumer to monitor and report errors — is legally defensible. It is not, however, a reasonable consumer protection posture for a technology that the company is actively marketing as a convenient, trustworthy assistant.

As agentic commerce scales, this liability gap will produce a regulatory flashpoint. The question is whether it happens after a high-profile incident (an agent that spends thousands on the wrong items, a hallucinated purchase that a consumer can’t reverse) or before one.

Sources

  1. Futurism: Target Warns That If Its AI Shopping Agent Makes an Expensive Mistake, You’ll Have to Pay for It
  2. Business Insider: Target’s Google Gemini AI shop terms update
  3. Target Terms of Service (archived)

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