Target just made a bet that the future of retail runs through artificial intelligence — and it’s asking customers to accept a remarkable trade-off in the process.
The Minneapolis-based retailer recently updated its terms of service to explicitly address the use of AI agents acting on behalf of shoppers. The new language, buried in the kind of legal document almost nobody reads, grants AI-powered tools the ability to browse products, add items to carts, and complete purchases on a customer’s behalf. But here’s the catch: if that AI agent makes a mistake — buys the wrong size, orders ten of something instead of one, misreads a promotion — the customer bears full responsibility.
Not Target. Not the AI developer. You.
Futurism first flagged the updated terms, noting that Target’s revised legal framework represents one of the earliest and most explicit attempts by a major retailer to define the rules of engagement for AI agent commerce. The updated terms state that users who authorize an AI agent to interact with Target’s platforms “are responsible for all actions taken by such agent on your behalf,” including purchases, returns, and account modifications.
The timing is no accident. A wave of AI agent technology is barreling toward consumer retail, driven by products from OpenAI, Google, Apple, and a growing roster of startups. These aren’t simple chatbots. They’re autonomous software programs designed to act independently — searching the web, comparing prices, filling out forms, entering payment information, and clicking “buy” without a human hovering over every keystroke. OpenAI’s Operator tool, launched earlier this year, is among the most prominent examples. Apple has signaled that Siri will gain agentic capabilities in future iOS updates. Google’s Project Mariner is exploring similar territory through Chrome.
Target, it appears, wants to be ready.
The Legal Architecture of Agentic Commerce
What makes Target’s move significant isn’t just that it acknowledged AI agents exist. It’s the liability framework the company constructed around them. Traditional e-commerce terms of service were written for a world where a human being — with eyes, judgment, and the ability to double-check an order before hitting submit — was always the one completing a transaction. AI agents break that assumption entirely.
Under Target’s updated terms, the retailer treats an AI agent as a direct extension of the customer. Whatever the agent does, the customer authorized. Whatever the agent gets wrong, the customer accepted. This is a clean, aggressive transfer of risk, and it mirrors the approach that legal scholars and technologists have been debating for months as agentic AI moves from lab demos to real-world deployment.
The question of who’s liable when an AI agent acts autonomously is one of the thorniest in commercial law right now. If an AI agent purchases a $3,000 television because it misinterpreted a voice command, is that a binding transaction? If it signs the customer up for a subscription service the customer didn’t want, who unwinds that? Target’s answer is unambiguous: the customer.
And Target isn’t entirely alone in thinking about this. According to reporting from Business Insider, multiple large retailers have begun internal reviews of their terms of service in anticipation of AI agent traffic increasing sharply over the next 12 to 18 months. But Target is among the first to publicly codify its position.
The legal language also raises questions about what happens when AI agents interact with promotional pricing, limited-quantity items, or loyalty programs. Target’s terms give the company broad discretion to cancel orders or suspend accounts if it determines that agent activity violates its policies — even if the customer didn’t know the agent was doing anything problematic. That’s a wide net.
For consumer advocates, this asymmetry is troubling. The customer assumes all downside risk for the agent’s behavior but has no guaranteed recourse if the agent malfunctions in a way that costs them money or compromises their account. Target retains the right to act unilaterally. The customer retains the bill.
Why Retailers Are Scrambling to Define the Rules Before the Agents Arrive
The commercial incentives here are enormous. AI agents promise to increase purchase frequency, reduce friction in the buying process, and potentially capture consumer spending that might otherwise go to competitors. An AI agent that knows your preferences, monitors prices, and automatically reorders household staples could lock in a degree of customer loyalty that no rewards program has ever achieved.
But the risks are just as real. Retailers worry about bots scraping pricing data, exploiting promotional loopholes, or overwhelming inventory systems with rapid-fire transactions. They worry about fraud — an AI agent authorized by one person in a household making purchases that another household member disputes. They worry about chargebacks, return abuse, and the operational cost of unwinding transactions that no human actually intended to make.
Target’s terms of service update is, in part, a defensive play. By establishing that the customer is responsible for their agent’s behavior, Target creates a legal buffer against the chaos that autonomous shopping could unleash on its operations. It’s also a signal to Wall Street and to competitors: Target is preparing for a world where a meaningful share of its e-commerce transactions may be initiated not by people but by software acting on their behalf.
That world may arrive faster than most consumers expect. OpenAI’s Operator can already perform multi-step web tasks, including online shopping. Anthropic has demonstrated similar capabilities with its Claude model. Startups like Rabbit and Humane have built dedicated hardware around the concept of an AI that handles tasks for you. And as Futurism noted, the convergence of these tools with major retail platforms is now a matter of when, not if.
The regulatory picture remains largely blank. No federal agency has issued binding guidance on AI agent commerce. The FTC has made general statements about AI and consumer protection but hasn’t addressed the specific question of liability when an autonomous agent completes a purchase. State attorneys general haven’t weighed in either. For now, the terms of service that companies like Target write are, by default, the governing law of this new commercial territory.
That gives retailers enormous power to shape the rules in their favor. And so far, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
Some legal experts see a parallel to the early days of online banking and electronic funds transfers, when financial institutions drafted terms that placed nearly all fraud risk on consumers until federal regulation caught up. The Electronic Fund Transfer Act eventually shifted much of that liability back to the banks. Whether a similar correction will happen with AI agent commerce is an open question — but one that consumer protection groups are already raising.
For now, Target shoppers who want to use an AI agent to handle their purchases should read the fine print. All of it. Because the moment that agent clicks “Place Order,” the responsibility is entirely theirs — no matter what went wrong, no matter who or what made the decision, and no matter whether a human ever saw the transaction at all.
The age of autonomous shopping has terms and conditions. And the retailer wrote them.
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