When AI Agents Start Spending Your Money | Alex Rampell & Terry Angelos

In the last three months, we've had this huge leap from agents being what I would call spectators to agents being actors because they effectively have arms and legs, which are payment credentials. Amazon recently blocked Muse, and there are many reasons for this. You can either be antagonistic to agentic commerce, or you can be highly receptive. What's happened with the rise of, you know, Muse and Instinct is once they have access to payment credentials, their utility increases. So we sort of have kicked off what I kind of call the wallet wars, where every wallet is now rushing to connect to the agents. Everybody who's listening to this podcast, I almost guarantee you have a credential that's stored at VGS. The largest online merchants, the largest neobanks, and the largest Frontier Labs all use VGS to secure payment credentials. It's a really formidable position to be in. Where do you think VGS is going to go? I think we are AI agents are moving from recommending what you should buy to actually buying it for you. That creates a deceptively hard question. How do you safely give an AI access to your money? In this episode, a sixteen z general partner Alex Rampell sits down with VGS chief strategy officer, Terry Angelos, to unpack the emergency payment infrastructure behind AgenTic Commerce. They discuss the new wallet wars, how payment credentials could move safely between consumers, agents, and merchants, and why new agentic tokens could allow AI to transact without breaking the protections consumers already expect from credit cards. They also get into what happens when an agent buys the wrong thing, why some merchants may actively resist agentic and how the economics of everything from credit card rewards to subscriptions could change when an AI is constantly optimizing on the consumer's behalf. Because giving agents the ability to spend doesn't just make them more useful, it could reshape who controls the customer relationship itself. Hi, everyone. I'm Alex Rampel, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and I'm here joined by Terry Angelos. And I'm very excited about being joined by Terry because Terry and I started a company called TrialPay in 2006, long, long time ago. Twenty years ago. Twenty years ago. Alex looked very different. Yes. You look the same. So I think you're insulting me and I'm complimenting you and hopefully not the other way around. But today, this is the really cool part. One of my first investments here was a company called VGS, which stands for very good security. And some people might not get that's actually a pun or a joke because one of the most famous cryptography companies was called PGP, which is pretty good privacy. And obviously, it's very good private... It's not just pretty good privacy. It's incredible privacy. It's unbreakable privacy because it's very hard to factor very large composite numbers into their primes, and pretty good privacy is actually very good. So that was kind of the original name …