Visa Mastercard Ant develop shared framework to verify AI agents
11 sourcesUpdated Sep 10, 2026
Ant International, Visa and Mastercard are developing a shared Know-Your-Agent framework to help payment networks, digital wallets, merchants and platforms verify AI agents and link them to accountable people or organizations. The framework would establish common trust, security, certification and monitoring signals while allowing each company to retain its own verification and risk-decision systems, potentially reducing duplicate onboarding and integration costs. The initiative builds on Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol, as well as Antom’s agentic-payment pilots supporting card and wallet transactions. The companies cite projections that AI agents could orchestrate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in consumer commerce by 2030, but the market remains nascent and the actual payment volume is uncertain. The collaboration also reflects a strategic contest over which payment rails will capture that commerce, since AI agents may favor bank transfers, wallets or stablecoins over traditional card networks unless Visa and Mastercard can remain central to settlement and trust.
Where do you stand?
How it spread
What each side asserts, disputes — or leaves out entirely.
Whose framing of this story rings truest to you?
Free account · your comment posts right after signup
The big issue is whether the card companies or the AI platforms end up keeping most of the value from these agent transactions.
This shared verification setup should cut down on repeated checks and let AI payments scale faster across networks.
