Speech by Governor Waller on payments in the age of AI agents - Federal Reserve Board

Governor Waller of the Federal Reserve has delivered a speech titled 'Payments in the age of AI agents', which sounds like a TED talk but arrives with central bank letterhead and nobody handing out tote bags. His first reassurance is that AI is not just an offensive tool — technically true, in the sense that a hammer is not just a weapon. Cyber professionals, he reports, are optimistic about using AI for threat detection, exposure management, and catching vulnerabilities before they are introduced. Optimistic. Paid to be, mostly. The people best positioned to tell you the defensive tooling works are the people with the defensive tooling on the invoice.

Then the honest sentence, tucked in where honest sentences go: 'there is clearly an asymmetry.' Threat actors need to exploit one key vulnerability; defenders must protect a large attack surface. That isn't an asymmetry, Governor, it's arithmetic — and the Fed has now said it aloud in September 2026, which is the same structural problem we flagged when Anthropic called GLM-5.3 a 'meaningful step change' in what attackers can do. One door versus every door, and the locksmith is on the attacker's payroll this quarter.

The back half of the speech concerns open versus closed agentic commerce, compared to open- and closed-loop payment networks — central bank language for: shortly, your chatbot gets a wallet. Closed loop means the agent can only spend inside one firm's walled garden, where the merchant sets the terms and the exit is decorative. Open loop means it can spend anywhere, which means the accumulated inheritance of card fraud, chargebacks and disputed charges gets ported onto something that transacts in milliseconds and never gets tired, embarrassed, or suspicious. Somewhere in the Fed there is a working group with a decent pension deciding the rails for software that has no legal personhood. The agent gets the card number, the goal, and a rate limit. You get the statement.