- Essays··8 min read
A Chinese Merchant, an AI Buyer, an AI Fraudster
China's largest e-commerce platforms have placed AI agents on both sides of the checkout in the same fiscal quarter — one places the order, one adjudicates the dispute, both owned by the platform. Alibaba's own CommerceAgentBench found the strongest frontier model completes 61.7 per cent of end-to-end commercial tasks, while a parallel HCI study mapped an active underground economy of AI-fabricated defect claims. The merchant carries the cost of both error rates.
agentic-commercechinese-platformsai-fraudmerchant-riskRead - Essays··10 min read
The Cart That Signs Itself
The question in agentic commerce has moved. A language model can assemble a cart, so the live issue is who holds legal authority when that cart signs itself against a live payments rail. The planner-executor split now carries cryptographic mandate obligations with EU regulatory teeth. The missing component in every production deployment studied here is an eval harness rigorous enough to catch the 5–10% of cases that define next quarter's returns rate.
agentic-commerceplanner-executorretail-aipayments-infrastructureRead