Visa, Mastercard and Ant build identity rails for AI agents
Visa, Mastercard and Ant International are developing a shared framework for identifying AI agents authorised to make payments.
Payments infrastructure was designed to authenticate people and merchants. Agentic commerce adds a new actor: autonomous software.
What happened
Visa, Mastercard and Ant International began developing a shared Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework for identifying AI agents authorised to make purchases.
Why it matters
If agents can transact on behalf of users, payment networks need ways to verify which agent is acting, what permissions it has and who is accountable when something goes wrong.
The bigger picture
Agentic commerce will require a new trust layer around identity, permissions and transaction controls. KYA could become an important piece of infrastructure analogous to KYC in human financial services.