Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International team up on a 'Know-Your-Agent' framework for AI shopping

Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard announced this week that they are collaborating on a "Know-Your-Agent" (KYA) interoperability framework, an effort to let card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms, and marketplaces recognize and verify AI shopping agents across otherwise-competing systems. The three companies currently run separate, incompatible protocols — Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol — and are now exploring how to align them around shared principles rather than merging them into one standard.

The problem KYA is meant to solve

AI shopping agents are moving from making purchase recommendations to actually completing transactions on a user's behalf, and the companies' joint announcement projects that AI agents will orchestrate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. That volume creates a coordination problem: a payment network, wallet, or marketplace has no reliable way to confirm that an incoming purchase request from an "agent" is legitimate, properly authorized by the actual account holder, and not a compromised or malicious bot — especially when the agent and the merchant sit on different networks with their own separate verification protocols.

The KYA architecture is meant to establish shared requirements for agent identity verification, accountability for who is responsible when something goes wrong, and continuous transaction monitoring — while leaving each network's own risk decisioning and certification process intact rather than replacing it.

Why interoperability, not consolidation

Rather than picking a single winning protocol, the three companies are pursuing a federated model: common trust signals that can be recognized across networks, reducing the need for an agent platform to integrate separately with every card network's proprietary verification system. For businesses building AI shopping agents, that would mean building to one shared trust standard instead of three incompatible ones — lowering integration cost and, in theory, time-to-market for new agentic commerce products.

What happens next

The announcement describes an exploratory collaboration on shared principles, not a finished, deployable standard — Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International will continue operating their individual protocols while working out where they can align. Whether this produces an actual interoperable specification, and how quickly card issuers, merchants, and agent developers adopt it, will be the real test of whether the initiative moves beyond a joint press release into something that changes how AI agents actually transact.

As first reported via Ant International, Visa, and Mastercard's joint press release.