Visa launched Trusted Agent Protocol, an innovative framework to support secure interaction between AI agents and merchants end-to-end across the entire transaction process. The protocol offers a basis for agentic commerce to enable AI to search, compare, and buy on behalf of consumers, and provide trust and transparency between merchants and AI agents. Built with Cloudflare, Trusted Agent Protocol further demonstrates Visa’s dedication to building more secure and frictionless experiences in the fast-paced intelligent payments environment. The protocol is now available through the Visa Developer Center and GitHub.
The use of AI in retail has picked up quite rapidly, with traffic from AI to U.S. retail sites increasing more than 4,700% in the last year, and 85% of shoppers describing enhanced shopping experiences when accessing AI. But with the rise of AI agents come also difficulties for merchants, such as: controlling bot detection systems that could block legitimate transactions by mistake, supporting logged-in and guest agent-initiated checkouts, and keeping visibility of consumer identity and payment information. The Trusted Agent Protocol solves this by allowing authorized agents to securely relay critical transaction information to merchants, differentiating trusted agents from malicious bots. Early input and cooperation on the protocol have included industry champions like Adyen, Ant International, Checkout.com, Coinbase, CyberSource, Elavon, Fiserv, Microsoft, Nuvei, Shopify, Stripe, and Worldpay.
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“We feel the whole payments ecosystem has a role in ensuring sellers trust AI agents to the same degree they trust their top customers and networks,” stated Jack Forestell, Chief Product & Strategy Officer, Visa. “For the past year, we’ve worked closely with sellers, issuers and partners to make sure agent-initiated transactions are as seamless and secure as any payment today. Our new agent protocol is focused on creating no-code functionality for merchants to securely identify agents with an intent to buy and provide a better payments and personalized experience for its known users.”
“Ensuring the future of commerce is a collective responsibility, particularly as AI agents start to act on behalf of consumers,” stated Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudflare. “Our collaboration with Visa on the Trusted Agent Protocol is an important step towards establishing the guardrails required for this new ecosystem.”
Empowering Merchants in the Era of AI-Enabled Buying
Trusted Agent Protocol prepares merchants to identify verified AI agents, validate their credentials, and continue enjoying customer relationships without disrupting current systems. Some of its main features are:
Agent Intent – Verifies the AI agent’s intention to obtain product information or proceed with a purchase.
Consumer Recognition – Shows whether the consumer has an existing account or history with the merchant.
Payment Information – Enables agents to hold payment information to facilitate the merchant’s preferred payment method.
Designed for the Future of Interoperable Commerce
While early specifications target the Visa network, Trusted Agent Protocol is intended for open ecosystem interoperability. Visa is collaborating with global standardization bodies such as IETF, OpenID Foundation, and EMVCo, among others, and industry partners such as Coinbase to align with other protocols like the Agentic Commerce Protocol and x402. Based on the HTTP Message Signature standard and compatible with Web Both Auth, the protocol enables merchants and agents to authenticate using the current web infrastructure with very little change in UX and can be used to extend to non-web message protocols.