EU can rein in AI agents with EUDI Wallets and business wallets: WE BUILD

The EU should take a coordinated approach to integrating AI agents into digital transactions, with special attention on payments, according to the WE BUILD consortium.

The group says that Europe is well placed to shape the emerging landscape of “agentic commerce,” in which AI systems act autonomously on behalf of users, businesses, and public bodies. The unique legal and technical foundations provided by the EUDI Wallet, the European Digital Identity Framework (EUDIF) and the Business Wallet framework will help address the trust, identity, and accountability challenges AI agents introduce, according to its new non-paper.

WE BUILD, an acronym for “Wallet Ecosystem Building in Large-scale Deployments,” is running one of the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Wallets Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) tasked with streamlining business and payment interactions.

The consortium explains that payments hold a particularly important place in agentic transactions. When an AI agent is instructed to make a purchase, such as buying a specific item, it must interact with merchants in a verifiable way. The AI agent must be able to confirm it is dealing with a genuine merchant, and vice versa.

At scale, the authors warn, failures in this chain could result in significant fraud. However, these can be secured cryptography and verifiable credentials, which are already embedded in EU identity frameworks. EU’s tools could enable mutual authentication between AI agents, verify the relationship between a human and their agent, and confirm that merchants are legitimate.

Authentication will also address merchants’ concerns about blocking automated agents that resemble bots, says WE BUILD.

Another solution is to use EUDI Wallets to digitally sign documents, images, and videos to distinguish them from AI-generated materials. The EUDI Wallets could serve as proof of human involvement, even when AI tools assisted in their creation.

The group provides three recommendations: The first is developing a strategy for safe AI agents, built on the European Digital Identity Framework (EUDIF) and the Business Wallet framework.

“States can reliably establish the identity of humans, businesses, and public bodies, while preserving privacy through mechanisms like selective disclosure,” says the document. “These identities can be carried in a technical concept called verifiable credentials, enabling cryptographically secure communications and signatures.”

The second recommendation calls on standards bodies to establish working groups focused on interoperability between EU Digital Identity Wallets and AI agents. Finally, the EU should prioritise testing and pilots before moving to regulation, and should regulate only where strictly necessary.

WE BUILD brings together nearly 200 partners, including EU member states, public entities, and companies such as Procivis, Veridas, Raidiam, Izertis, and Youverse.

Article Topics

agentic commerce  |  AI agents  |  digital wallets  |  EU Digital Identity Wallet  |  European Business Wallet  |  WE BUILD consortium