If your free AI agent earns a cut of what it buys for you, who is it really working for?
AI agents are starting to cancel forgotten subscriptions and could soon move idle cash to better rates, wiping out the money companies make from our inattention. But if the agent’s owner gets paid through a fee on every transaction it handles, have we ended the ‘forgetfulness tax’ or just handed it to a new collector, and how would an ordinary person ever tell the difference?
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The September 28 episode of Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts dug into CNBC’s report on Meta’s free agent, Muse, which has made forgotten subscriptions an easy target. The stakes are real: Stanford economist Neale Mahoney’s research estimates that forgetting and hassle together roughly double what sellers take in, and Apollo’s Torsten Slok warns that agents could soon sweep household cash out of near-zero checking accounts. The episode’s tension is that the agent is free to use, yet Mark Zuckerberg says Meta expects to profit from a small fee on transactions, without saying how big it is or who pays, while Amazon has already blocked the agent from its store. That leaves an open question about whether an agent paid on what it buys will always steer you toward what is best for you, and what kind of disclosure would let you check. Give the episode a listen and tell us: what would an agent have to show you before you trusted it with your wallet?
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