By Minakshi Das
Autonomous AI systems are already negotiating contracts, executing payments, and making economic decisions on behalf of Indian citizens and businesses. The question is no longer whether machines will act for us. It is whether anyone will be accountable when they do, and whether India will write those rules or inherit them.
At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Pine Labs announced a collaboration with OpenAI to embed AI reasoning into its payment infrastructure, enabling “agentic commerce” tools that can negotiate supplier terms, optimize workflows, and manage recurring payments autonomously. This shifts commercial systems from passive transaction recorders to active decision-making machines.
Cashfree Payments launched Cashfree Here, embedding UPI and card checkout directly into conversational AI interfaces. Meanwhile, $200 billion in AI investment commitments were announced at the summit. Here, deployment is accelerating and governance is not.
Sam Altman warned that early superintelligence may arrive within years. Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang described “personal superintelligence” that anticipates goals and acts autonomously. Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch warned that the world is sleepwalking toward dangerous AI power concentration, describing a world where nations now deploy “armies of AI delegates” and those who do not own their infrastructure will have no control over who turns it off. French President Emmanuel Macron argued that algorithmic transparency is a democratic necessity, not a regulatory preference. A warning that applies even more urgently to autonomous economic systems now embedded in India’s commercial infrastructure.
The Ethical Problem Inside Every Agent
Every AI agent runs on an objective function, a set of rules deciding what it optimizes: profit, efficiency, or risk. These rules reflect designer priorities, biased data, and reward structures never examined by the public. When two agents negotiate a loan, contract, or price, the outcome reflects their competing goals at machine speed, creating a legitimacy crisis: major decisions made by systems with no accountability.
Indian law hasn’t defined where human oversight is mandatory. Competitive pressures push it ever lower. Technically, outcomes are emergent; in practice, they can produce discriminatory pricing, tacit collusion, or market concentration. Mastercard confirmed that AI already detects fraud and executes payments in milliseconds. As these systems continuously adapt, their behaviour can shift in ways current laws aren’t equipped to manage.
Consent Cannot Be Static
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act was designed for human-to-system interactions. Agentic AI breaks that model. Citizens’ data now powers systems that can negotiate on their behalf, often against other AI with different goals. Consent can no longer be a one-time checkbox.
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