In 2026 the bigger shift in disputes is inside the customer's bank, where AI models now flag customers who may be disputing a purchase they made.
The popular 2026 story is that AI has tilted disputes against merchants. Customers use it to draft disputes, fake evidence and file complaints by bot. The usual advice is to stop fighting disputes and focus on prevention. That advice overlooks a bigger shift inside the customer's bank.
The largest US banks spent 2024 and 2025 training internal machine-learning models to catch customers who dispute a purchase they made themselves. Chase, Capital One, Citi and Bank of America each run a version of these models on the dispute-review side. When a dispute is filed, the system scores how likely it is that the customer made the purchase and is disputing it anyway. The score stays inside the bank. You never see it, and its effect shows only in the outcome.
Suppose the model flags a dispute as likely made by the real buyer, and you send a credible reply with clean evidence. The bank now sides with the merchant at materially higher rates than two years ago. The effect varies. Chase is further along than Bank of America. Major banks are further along than co-branded retail cards. Disputes where the customer says they did not get what they paid for show more of it than disputes about processing errors. The direction is consistent, and the lift is large enough to move a store's win rate across a year.
You cannot tune your reply to a score you cannot see. You can send what a credible reply looks like to the bank's reviewer. That means the right dispute reason (the code on your notice), evidence labelled by what it proves, and framing that fits the specific bank's observed review patterns. It also means sending it well inside the response window. A weak reply on a flagged case still loses. A credible reply on the same case wins more often than in 2023.
Some merchants pulled back on fighting disputes because they believed AI disputes cannot be beaten. They have misread 2026. AI on the customer side adds to dispute volume. AI inside the bank helps credible cases. A merchant who keeps up the quality of their replies may recover more, and one who cut the budget may be leaving that money behind. representments.com drafts each letter with framing for the specific bank and evidence labelled to the bank's review form, and updates its drafting logic as outcomes come in.