Mercury launched Mercury Spend on August 11, 2026, including Agent Cards for businesses that want AI agents to make purchases under human-set limits. A person creates the card and specifies the budget ceiling, merchant restrictions, and category limits.
Mercury describes purchases being declined when they exceed the budget and cards freezing when a required receipt is missing. Transactions log automatically. Those are product-described controls; a team needs to test how they behave in its purchasing workflow before delegating spending.
Assign authority to a specific job
A possible use is a procurement agent that receives a SaaS request, checks the approved budget, purchases the license, and files the receipt. Another is an operations agent ordering supplies when inventory falls below a threshold. These are illustrative assignments, with the card providing one part of the control system.
The human owner still needs to define which requests the agent may accept, how it checks the purchase, and where exceptions go. A valid payment can still buy the wrong item. Review needs to cover the assignment as well as the transaction.
Inspect the boundaries before use
Budget enforcement at the point of sale, merchant restrictions, receipt requirements, and an audit trail make purchasing authority easier to inspect. Check the actual vendor and category rules, who can change a limit, and what happens when a card freezes. Decide who reviews transactions and who can revoke access.
Asana’s April 2026 AI Teammates announcement describes a related approach to visibility: agents working inside projects alongside people, updating shared roadmaps as priorities change. Both products place assigned agent work in a record the supervising team can inspect.
A June 2026 Metrigy study of over 300 companies found that 65 percent had a security and compliance strategy for AI agents, leaving 35 percent without one. A documented strategy still needs evidence from use, including tests of spending limits and exception handling.
Review the systems around the card
The reported Pixel 11 launch described an on-device agent coordinating across forty apps. Alongside Asana’s shared project work and Mercury’s purchasing feature, it illustrates the range of systems to which agents may gain access. Each connection needs its own authorization and review.
Before issuing an Agent Card, record what the agent owns, the limits on its spending, and the person responsible for its work. Test a rejected purchase and a missing receipt as well as a successful payment. Use the resulting record to decide whether the proposed authority is appropriate.