India builds AI-agent registry for UPI payments

Agentic payments are moving from demos toward national-scale financial infrastructure.

What happened

India’s payments authority is developing a registry to verify and monitor AI agents making transactions through UPI. The proposal is part of a wider agentic-payments framework and is expected to begin with smaller, frequent purchases.

Why it matters

Autonomous payments create questions around authorisation, fraud and liability that ordinary account-to-account transfers were never designed to handle.

The bigger picture

As AI agents become capable of spending money, payment systems will need machine identity and permission layers alongside the human authentication systems they already use.