Wall Street races to build AI agents that trade 24/7

UBS Wealth Management says artificial intelligence is moving beyond text generation into scientific research, opening investment opportunities across AI infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, nuclear fusion, industrial materials and utilities. The shift was highlighted by OpenAI's recent mathematical proof related to the Navier-Stokes equations, a centuries-old fluid dynamics problem and one of seven Millennium Prize Problems, which OpenAI tackled using 10,000 autonomous AI agents working in parallel for 88 hours before formalizing the proof with Lean, a system for machine-checked mathematical validation. In pharmaceuticals, multi-agent AI systems can simulate millions of protein variations in the cloud, and more than 170 AI-designed programs are already in development or clinical evaluation, including Phase III trials. In nuclear fusion, reinforcement-learning systems can predict plasma disruptions around 200 milliseconds before they occur and adjust magnetic coils thousands of times per second, while AI models in materials science can test millions of elemental combinations daily in search of properties for lighter, higher-density batteries, lower-heat computing hardware and potential room-temperature superconductors. The broader investment case centers on AI becoming a tool for automating scientific research rather than simply generating content, with companies exposed to AI infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, industrial materials and utilities positioned to benefit as these technologies move toward commercial applications.

Europe has moved agentic payments into live production while the United States remains stalled over who bears the loss when an AI agent errs. Live end-to-end payments have been executed by Santander, Mastercard, ING, and Worldline, and on July 2, 2026, ING, Worldline, and Visa completed an agentic payment in Germany using Visa Payment Passkeys for biometric authentication. Mastercard has enabled all issuers in Europe at the network level for Agent Pay, backed by a new Lisbon Centre of Excellence for Innovation, with Mastercard Europe President Kelly Devine calling agentic payments a profound shift in how commerce is initiated and executed. In the US, the Treasury OIG has flagged ambiguity in Regulation E on agent authorization, and the AI AGENT Act introduced in July 2026 addresses fiduciary duties rather than liability allocation for agent misexecution, prompting the Consumer Bankers Association to recommend the industry write its own private network rules. Hypertrade data shows a 4,700% year-over-year increase in AI-generated traffic to retail sites, yet agentic commerce is less than 1% of US e-commerce, with only 23% of US consumers trusting generative AI to handle payment transactions and 93% of merchants saying the AI provider should bear the financial loss for incorrect purchases.

Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets cardholders give an AI agent a virtual card to buy things online without checking in before each purchase, with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval before checkout. Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed, while Meta's Muse can search for products and navigate checkout but presents the purchase for the user's final approval. Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, called it "a land grab for infrastructure standards," saying that if card companies set the standards for agentic commerce they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come. Consumer appetite lags the infrastructure push: just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide, and more than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to record who authorized the agent to shop and what it was authorized to buy, but when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent and did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.