“One of the, I think, annoying things about crypto is none of it's reversible. So if your agent goes rogue and sends a bunch of Bitcoin or whatever, there's just no way to get it back. Whereas if your agent goes rogue and goes and does a big e-commerce shop, you can normally dispute it. And you might have to send the stuff back, but you'll get the money back.”
Newcomer Pod · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Eric Newcomer asked whether a bank like Mercury worries about lawsuits once AI agents start spending people's money. Akhund compares it to the arrival of internet banking, and argues the fact that card and bank payments can be reversed is an underrated safety feature.
Transcript
I mean, if a person really wants to, like, I'm not here to like, yeah, we're trying to protect the customers. It's like, it's not, we're not here to police the customer. So if they're doing it, if they really want to get out of the way, I'm sure they can enable fully automated payments. I really.
…like lawsuits every direction at some point. Somebody's going to spend money that they regret, even if it was their fault, and they're going to sue everybody involved and say an agent was involved. Like you should have stopped it, right? Like, do you worry about that as a company? Is that a risk?
Maybe, but I'm guessing the same thing happened when internet banking happened or whatever, right? It was like before it was like, oh, you had to go into a bank branch and you had to authorize this payment. And now you can be hacked on the internet. And yeah, there's laws in place. There's like things you can dispute. Actually, the banking system has dealt with this a lot, right? There's like, there's fraud and there's lots of fraud controls and things like that. Then there's like you doing something. And then, you know, when is it the merchant's fault? When is it your accountability? So there's a lot of actually rules already in place. So it depends on like the exact situation, probably. A lot of the benefit of banking is a lot of the stuff is reversible in a way that, you know, when people look, yeah, talk about crypto or whatever, like one of the, I think, annoying things about crypto is none of it's reversible. So, you know, if your agent goes rogue and sends a bunch of Bitcoin or whatever, there's just no way to get it back. Whereas if your agent goes rogue and like goes and does a big e-commerce shop, you can normally dispute it. And I…
where it'll send emails that people didn't expect.
Yeah. But I mean, actually, right.
But if you extend that out, it's like, oh, once payments, you know, are connected. I mean, I've
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