AI Robots Aren't Really Shopping Online Yet, Study Finds

New research shows very few online payments come from AI agents — most are just automated scripts, not smart shopping robots.

You may have heard the exciting idea that AI agents (software programs that act on your behalf, like a digital assistant that can buy things for you) are already spending money online. A new study says: not really.

A company called TRM Labs (a firm that studies blockchain activity to spot patterns and fraud) looked at a payment system called x402. This system, made by the crypto exchange Coinbase, lets computers pay for things online automatically as part of a web request.

What the researchers found:

They studied about $52.7 million across 198.9 million payments since May 2025.
After removing suspicious activity (like people paying themselves), only $25.62 million looked like real shopping.
AI agents were behind just 0.6% to 7.5% of that real commerce.

So why so low? The problem is that a simple script (a basic pre-written program that repeats one task over and over) can make the exact same kind of payment as a smart AI agent. That makes them very hard to tell apart. The researchers admit their method might even undercount real AI agents, since some agents just buy the same thing repeatedly and look like plain scripts.

One interesting detail: nearly all payments (99.6%) were made using USDC — a stablecoin (a type of cryptocurrency designed to always be worth about $1, making it steady and useful for payments).

Despite the low numbers, big companies are still betting on this future. Binance, Coinbase, and even Amazon (with Coinbase and Stripe) have all launched tools to let AI agents pay for services with stablecoins.

TRM also warned about a safety gap: right now it's hard to know who is responsible for each AI agent's spending, because owners don't have to register them.

The bottom line: The technology to let AI agents pay for things works — but the era of robots doing our shopping hasn't truly arrived. As TRM put it, "Agentic commerce will need agentic compliance."

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://decrypt.co/378103/ai-agents-spending-money-research