Target Warns That If Its AI Shopping Agent Makes an Expensive Mistake, You’ll Have to Pay for It
TL;DR
Target has launched an AI-powered shopping agent designed to make purchases autonomously on behalf of users.
Key Points
- The terms of service explicitly state that Target does not guarantee the agent will 'act exactly as you intend in all circumstances'.
- If the agent makes a costly mistake – such as a wrong or duplicate order – the user bears the financial responsibility, not Target.
- The company is effectively offloading the risk of autonomous AI actions entirely onto its customers.
Nauti's Take
'We take no responsibility, but please hand us your credit card anyway' – welcome to the age of agentic commerce. It is almost symptomatic that one of the first real-world deployments of a shopping agent buries in the fine print that the technology simply is not reliable enough to stand behind.
No reasonable person would tell a human buyer: 'Order whatever you like – the bill is mine regardless. ' Why should an AI be any different?
As long as providers can fully offload risk onto users, there is zero incentive to actually minimize the error rate.
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