Your Agent Just Authorized What?! — Jay Mok & Ben Coumes, Paypal

A PayPal order has always been synchronous. You find the item, you open the app, you approve it, it is done. The approval token demonstrated here inverts that: the user approves before the agent has found an item or picked a merchant, and PayPal returns a JSON payload carrying the amount, the expiry, and the merchant the agent is permitted to transact with. It was days from shipping when this was recorded. That inversion is the concrete end of a broader argument about agent authorization, built on three questions any such system has to answer. Did the human authorize this? Is it allowed right now, in this scope? And can we prove it later? The answers, the talk argues, depend entirely on how high the stakes are and on whether the two parties have ever met. The rest maps those questions onto a ladder. At the bottom is a coding agent, where consent happens once when tools are connected, permission is granted per tool as allow, ask or deny, and ordinary logs are proof enough because the actions can be reverted. In the middle is money moving between parties who already know each other through a shared vault and OAuth scopes, where a mandate carries the amount and the scope and existing transaction logs settle disputes. At the top is the case nobody has running in production yet: an agent transacting autonomously with a counterparty it has never met. The proposal there is a layered selective disclosure JWT, so a merchant can verify the checkout and a processor can verify the payment mandate without either knowing the other. Timestamps: 0:00 - Terminator, and the agent that empties your wallet 1:26 - Three questions any agent authorization has to answer 2:49 - Stakes, counterparties, and the badge analogy 4:12 - Low stakes: a coding agent with allow, ask and deny 6:15 - Medium stakes: a shared vault and OAuth scopes 9:45 - High stakes: counterparties who have never met 10:29 - A layered selective disclosure JWT 12:30 - The approval token, and inverting the order flow 14:31 - Why the ladder applies beyond payments