Mastercard, Visa, Ant pilot Know-Your-Agent for AI checkout

Mastercard's move with Visa and Ant International arrives as AI agents increasingly shop on a customer's behalf, raising a basic trust question: how can merchants know the software is approved? The Know-Your-Agent initiative, unveiled Thursday through the Monetary Authority of Singapore-backed BuildFin.ai platform, tries to answer by connecting three existing protocols — Mastercard Verifiable Intent, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol — so card networks, digital wallets, marketplaces and AI platforms can identify approved purchasing agents while keeping their own authorization rules.

Mastercard already moves enormous volume: it handled 47.4 billion switched transactions last quarter and generated $9.28 billion in revenue. More agentic purchasing activity could bring additional transactions onto its network, which is presumably why the company is investing in a common identity layer. But the same shift creates a thorny question the initiative does not yet resolve: who pays when autonomous software authorizes the wrong transaction?

Shared identity standards may reduce fraud and confusion, and the involvement of Visa and Ant International suggests the effort spans more than one network and region. Still, investors lack an adoption timetable, a defined revenue model and clear rules for allocating losses — the three items that would turn a technical pilot into a measurable business. Mastercard shares slipped approximately 0.4% to $565.095 in morning trading and trade 17% below the GF Value estimate of $680.81, a gap that may narrow only once those commercial details emerge.