Visa, Mastercard and Ant International just agreed to build a shared ID system for AI agents that shop with your credit card.
On September 9, the three companies announced a joint framework called Know-Your-Agent, or KYA, that lets their separate AI agent verification systems recognize each other. Visa has its Trusted Agent Protocol. Mastercard has Verifiable Intent. Ant International, the fintech arm connected to Alibaba, has its own Agentic Mobile Protocol. Until now, a developer building a shopping agent had to integrate with all three separately. KYA is meant to end that.
The stakes explain the urgency. AI agents could orchestrate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, according to the companies' own projection cited in their joint announcement. That's not a rounding error on retail spending. It's a full shift in who clicks buy, and the card networks want to be the ones checking IDs at the door.
Three protocols, no shared language #
Here's the actual problem. Right now, if a merchant sees a purchase coming from software instead of a person, they have no shared way to know whether that agent is real or who built it. And no shared way to know if it's actually allowed to spend on someone's behalf. Each network answers that differently. Visa's protocol anchors on program participation and key registries at the web layer, with agents proving they hold a valid key through RFC 9421 signatures. Mastercard's Verifiable Intent stacks three layers instead: a payment-credential issuer, then user signing, then agent signing, with keys bound through what engineers call cnf semantics. Ant's Agentic Mobile Protocol adds a third design on top of both. None of the three currently talk to each other.
KYA doesn't replace any of them.
Visa announced on June 10 a partnership with OpenAI that embeds its payment network inside ChatGPT, enabling AI agents to complete purchases at any Visa-accepting merchant using tokenized credentials scoped to specific agents, spending limits, and merchant categories. The move puts Visa in direct competition with Mastercard's blockchain-based... - how to embed payment processing in ChatGPT - agentic commerce payments infrastructure for AI agents
It's meant to sit above all three as a common language, so a wallet running Visa's system can still recognize an agent verified through Mastercard's rails, without either side rebuilding anything. The companies say the shared approach targets cross-network operator traceability and common certification requirements. It's also meant to support continuous transaction monitoring. It can also cut the steps needed to link a payment agent to a digital wallet by half compared with traditional card-binding methods, according to the joint announcement.
The work is being coordinated through BuildFin.ai, an industry platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. That's not an accident. MAS has spent the past year pushing banks and technology firms toward shared safeguards for AI in finance, and KYA builds on an earlier MAS-backed effort called SAFR, short for Safeguards for Agentic Finance at Runtime. Routing a rivalry between Visa and Mastercard through a neutral regulator's platform is a smart way to get two competitors to agree on anything. It also means the eventual standard carries Singapore's fingerprints, not just a card network's logo.
Whose toll booth wins #
Frankly, this isn't really about protecting shoppers. Visa and Mastercard spent decades building trust with humans: a card number, a signature, a face on a phone screen. None of that means much when the thing making the purchase is software acting on instructions it got an hour ago. KYA is the card networks admitting that agentic commerce isn't some future scenario. It's already showing up in their transaction logs, and whoever controls the identity layer underneath it gets to charge a toll on everything that flows through.
That's the real fight.
Amazon, Perplexity and OpenAI are all racing to build agents that can complete a purchase without a human confirming each step. If those agents start routing around card rails entirely, using stablecoins or direct bank transfers instead, Visa and Mastercard lose their cut. No card, no cut. A shared verification layer keeps agentic spending running through their existing pipes rather than around them. Ant International, for its part, gets a seat at a table usually reserved for the two big Western networks, plus a chance to push its Agentic Mobile Protocol beyond China's borders.
None of the three companies have published a technical spec yet, and there's no ship date attached to KYA. Forkast's reporting on the announcement noted that agreeing on shared principles is the easy part; getting three networks with different liability models and different regulators to implement common trust signals usually takes years, not months. For now, KYA is a handshake, not a working system. But it's the clearest sign yet that the biggest names in payments think AI agents are about to start spending real money, and they'd rather build the ID card now than get locked out of checking it later.
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