Visa is introducing a brand new security framework designed to unravel considered one of the thorniest problems emerging in artificial intelligence-powered commerce: how retailers can tell the difference between legitimate AI shopping assistants and the malicious bots that plague their web sites.
The payments giant unveiled its Trusted Agent Protocol on Tuesday, establishing what it describes as foundational infrastructure for “agentic commerce” — a term for the rapidly growing practice of consumers delegating shopping tasks to AI agents that may search products, compare prices, and complete purchases autonomously.
The protocol enables merchants to cryptographically confirm that an AI agent browsing their site is allowed and trustworthy, fairly than a bot designed to scrape pricing data, test stolen bank cards, or perform other fraudulent activities.
The launch comes as AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail web sites has exploded by greater than 4,700% over the past yr, in line with data from Adobe cited by Visa. That dramatic surge has created an acute challenge for merchants whose existing bot detection systems — designed to dam automated traffic — now risk unintentionally blocking legitimate AI shoppers together with bad actors.
“Merchants need additional tools that provide them with greater insight and transparency into agentic commerce activities to make sure they will participate safely,” said Rubail Birwadker, Visa’s Global Head of Growth, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “Without common standards, potential risks include ecosystem fragmentation and the proliferation of closed loop models.”
The stakes are substantial. While 85% of shoppers who’ve used AI to buy report improved experiences, merchants face the prospect of either turning away legitimate AI-powered customers or exposing themselves to classy bot attacks. Visa’s own data shows the corporate prevented $40 billion in fraudulent activity between October 2022 and September 2023, nearly double the previous yr, much of it involving AI-powered enumeration attacks where bots systematically test combos of card numbers until finding valid credentials.
Inside the cryptographic handshake: How Visa verifies AI shopping agents
Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol operates through what Birwadker describes as a “cryptographic trust handshake” between merchants and approved AI agents. The system works in three steps:
First, AI agents have to be approved and onboarded through Visa’s Intelligent Commerce program, where they undergo vetting to satisfy trust and reliability standards. Each approved agent receives a singular digital signature key — essentially a cryptographic credential that proves its identity.
When an approved agent visits a merchant’s website, it creates a digital signature using its key and transmits three categories of knowledge: Agent Intent (indicating the agent is trusted and intends to retrieve product details or make a purchase order), Consumer Recognition (data showing whether the underlying consumer has an existing account with the merchant), and Payment Information (optional payment data to support checkout).
Merchants or their infrastructure providers, corresponding to content delivery networks, then validate these digital signatures against Visa’s registry of approved agents. “Upon proper validation of those fields, the merchant can confirm the signature is a trusted agent,” Birwadker explained.
Crucially, Visa designed the protocol to require minimal changes to existing merchant infrastructure. Built on the HTTP Message Signature standard and aligned with Web Both Auth, the protocol works with existing web infrastructure without requiring merchants to overhaul their checkout pages. “This is no-code functionality,” Birwadker emphasized, though merchants might have to integrate with Visa’s Developer Center to access the verification system.
The race for AI commerce standards: Visa faces competition from Google, OpenAI, and Stripe
Visa developed the protocol in collaboration with Cloudflare, the online infrastructure and security company that already provides bot management services to tens of millions of internet sites. The partnership reflects Visa’s recognition that solving bot verification requires cooperation across the complete web stack, not only the payments layer.
“Trusted Agent Protocol supplements traditional bot management by providing merchants insights that enable agentic commerce,” Birwadker said. “Agents are providing additional context they otherwise wouldn’t, including what it intends to do, who the underlying consumer is, and payment information.”
The protocol arrives as multiple technology giants race to determine competing standards for AI commerce. Google recently introduced its Agent Protocol for Payments (AP2), while OpenAI and Stripe have discussed their very own approaches to enabling AI agents to make purchases. Microsoft, Shopify, Adyen, Ant International, Checkout.com, Cybersource, Elavon, Fiserv, Nuvei, and Worldpay provided feedback during Trusted Agent Protocol’s development, in line with Visa.
When asked how Visa’s protocol pertains to these competing efforts, Birwadker struck a collaborative tone. “Both Google’s AP2 and Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol are working toward the identical goal of constructing trust in agent-initiated payments,” he said. “We are engaged with Google, OpenAI, and Stripe and wish to create compatibility across the ecosystem.”
Visa says it’s working with global standards bodies including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), OpenID Foundation, and EMVCo to make sure the protocol can eventually turn out to be interoperable with other emerging standards. “While these specifications apply to the Visa network on this initial phase, enabling agents to soundly and securely act on a consumer’s behalf requires an open, ecosystem-wide approach,” Birwadker noted.
Who pays when AI agents go rogue? Unanswered questions on liability and authorization
The protocol raises essential questions on authorization and liability when AI agents make purchases on behalf of consumers. If an agent completes an unauthorized transaction — perhaps misunderstanding a user’s intent or exceeding its delegated authority — who bears responsibility?
Birwadker emphasized that the protocol helps merchants “leverage this information to enable experiences tied to existing consumer relationships and safer checkout,” but he didn’t provide specific details about how disputes can be handled when agents make unauthorized purchases. Visa’s existing fraud protection and chargeback systems would presumably apply, though the corporate has not yet published detailed guidance on agent-initiated transaction disputes.
The protocol also places Visa within the position of gatekeeper for the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem. Because Visa determines which AI agents get approved for the Intelligent Commerce program and receive cryptographic credentials, the corporate effectively controls which agents merchants can easily trust. “Agents are approved and onboarded through the Visa Intelligent Commerce program, ensuring they meet our standards for trust and reliability,” Birwadker said, though he didn’t detail the precise criteria agents must meet or whether Visa charges fees for approval.
This gatekeeping role could prove contentious, particularly if Visa’s approval process favors large technology firms over startups, or if the corporate faces pressure to dam agents from competitors or politically controversial entities. Visa declined to supply details about what number of agents it has approved to date or how long the vetting process typically takes.
Visa’s legal battles and the long road to merchant adoption
The protocol launch comes at a posh moment for Visa, which continues to navigate significant legal and regulatory challenges whilst its core business stays robust. The company’s latest earnings report for the third quarter of fiscal yr 2025 showed a ten% increase in net revenues to $9.2 billion, driven by resilient consumer spending and robust growth in cross-border transaction volume. For the complete fiscal yr ending September 30, 2024, Visa processed 289 billion transactions, with a complete payments volume of $15.2 trillion.
However, the corporate’s legal headwinds have intensified. In July 2025, a federal judge rejected a landmark $30 billion settlement that Visa and Mastercard had reached with merchants over long-disputed bank card swipe fees, sending the parties back to the negotiating table and increasing the long-running legal battle.
Simultaneously, Visa stays under investigation by the Department of Justice over its rules for routing debit card transactions, with regulators scrutinizing whether the corporate’s practices unlawfully limit merchant selection and stifle competition. These domestic challenges are mirrored abroad, where European regulators have continued their very own antitrust investigations into the fee structures of each Visa and its primary competitor, Mastercard.
Against this backdrop of regulatory pressure, Birwadker acknowledged that adoption of the Trusted Agent Protocol will take time. “As agentic commerce continues to rise, we recognize that consumer trust continues to be in its early stages,” he said. “That’s why our focus through 2025 is on constructing foundational credibility and demonstrating real-world value.”
The protocol is out there immediately in Visa’s Developer Center and on GitHub, with agent onboarding already energetic and merchant integration resources available. But Birwadker declined to supply specific targets for the way many merchants might adopt the protocol by the top of 2026. “Adoption is aligned with the momentum we’re already seeing,” he said. “The launch of our protocol marks one other big step — it isn’t only a technical milestone, but a signal that the industry is starting to unify.”
Industry analysts say merchant adoption will likely rely upon how quickly agentic commerce grows as a percentage of overall e-commerce. While AI-driven traffic has surged dramatically, much of that consists of agents browsing and researching fairly than completing purchases. If AI agents begin accounting for a major share of accomplished transactions, merchants will face stronger incentives to adopt verification systems like Visa’s protocol.
From fraud detection to AI gatekeeping: Visa’s $10 billion bet on artificial intelligence
Visa’s move reflects broader strategic bets on AI across the financial services industry. The company has invested $10 billion in technology over the past five years to scale back fraud and increase network security, with AI and machine learning central to those efforts. Visa’s fraud detection system analyzes over 500 different attributes for every transaction, using AI models to assign real-time risk scores to the 300 billion annual transactions flowing through its network.
“Every single considered one of those transactions has been processed by AI,” James Mirfin, Visa’s global head of risk and identity solutions, said in a July 2024 CNBC interview discussing the corporate’s fraud prevention efforts. “If you see a brand new kind of fraud happening, our model will see that, it should catch it, it should rating those transactions as high risk after which our customers can determine to not approve those transactions.”
The company has also moved aggressively into recent payment territories beyond its core card business. In January 2025, Visa partnered with Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) to supply the infrastructure for a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment service called the X Money Account, competing with services like Venmo and Zelle. That deal marked Visa’s first major partnership within the social media payments space and reflected the corporate’s recognition that payment flows are increasingly happening outside traditional e-commerce channels.
The agentic commerce protocol represents an extension of this strategy — an try to ensure Visa stays central to payment flows whilst the mechanics of shopping shift from direct human interaction to AI intermediation. Jack Forestell, Visa’s Chief Product & Strategy Officer, framed the protocol in expansive terms: “We consider the complete payments ecosystem has a responsibility to make sure sellers trust AI agents with the identical confidence they place of their most valued customers and networks.”
The coming battle for control of AI shopping
The real test for Visa’s protocol won’t be technical — it should be political. As AI agents turn out to be a bigger force in retail, whoever controls the verification infrastructure controls access to a whole bunch of billions of dollars in commerce. Visa’s position as gatekeeper gives it enormous leverage, but in addition makes it a goal.
Merchants chafing under Visa’s existing fee structure and facing multiple antitrust investigations may resist ceding much more power to the payments giant. Competitors like Google and OpenAI, each with their very own ambitions in commerce, have little incentive to let Visa dictate standards. Regulators already scrutinizing Visa’s market dominance will certainly examine whether its agent approval process unfairly benefits certain players.
And there is a deeper query lurking beneath the technical specifications and company partnerships: In an economy increasingly mediated by AI, who decides which algorithms get to spend our money? Visa is making an aggressive bid to be that arbiter, wrapping its answer within the language of security and interoperability. Whether merchants, consumers, and regulators accept that proposition will determine not only the fate of the Trusted Agent Protocol, however the structure of AI-powered commerce itself.
For now, Visa is moving forward with the arrogance of an organization that has weathered disruption before. But within the emerging world of agentic commerce, being too trusted might prove just as dangerous as not being trusted enough.
