Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol sets new standard for secure agentic transactions

Visa unveiled the Trusted Agent Protocol, establishing a foundational framework for agentic commerce that enables secure communication between AI agents and merchants during every step of a transaction. The Trusted Agent Protocol aims to address the challenges facing agent-driven commerce, ushering in a new era where AI can search, compare, and pay on behalf of consumers while ensuring trust between merchants and AI agents.

Developed in collaboration with Cloudflare, the release of this protocol reinforces Visa’s commitment to supporting safer and more seamless interactions in the evolving ecosystem of intelligent payments.

Over the past year, AI-driven traffic to retail websites in the United States surged over 4,700%, and 85% of shoppers who have used AI to shop say it improved their shopping experience. But as more AI agents browse and buy on behalf of consumers, merchants face new challenges:

• Managing bot detection systems that can mistakenly block legitimate agentic transactions
• Supporting agent-driven guest and logged-in checkout
• Preserving visibility into the consumer behind the agent and payment data

The Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to address these challenges by enabling approved agents to securely pass critical information to merchants. This provides a much-needed framework for recognizing trusted agents with commerce intent and distinguishing them from malicious automation and rogue bots. In developing this protocol, Visa has received feedback from early partners including Adyen, Ant International, Checkout.com, Coinbase, CyberSource, Elavon, Fiserv, Microsoft, Nuvei, Shopify, Stripe, and Worldpay.

“We believe the entire payments ecosystem has a responsibility to ensure sellers can trust AI agents as much as they trust their best customers and networks,” said 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,” Forestell continued.

“Securing the future of commerce is a shared responsibility, especially as AI agents begin to act on behalf of consumers,” said Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudflare. “Our work with Visa on the Trusted Agent Protocol is a vital step in building the necessary guardrails for this new ecosystem.”

Supporting merchants

In an agentic world, merchants need a way to recognize trusted agents, verify their credentials, and maintain customer relationships without overhauling their systems.

Trusted Agent Protocol addresses these challenges with new specifications that use agent-specific cryptographic signatures and includes the following information:

• Agent intent – An indication that the agent is a trusted agent with an intent to retrieve additional details about, or purchase, a specific product from a merchant.
• Consumer recognition – Data elements that indicate whether a consumer has an existing account or has previously interacted with the merchant.
• Payment information – Agents have the option to carry payment data to support a merchant’s preferred checkout or payment method.

Built for the future of commerce interoperability

While these initial specifications apply to the Visa network in this phase, enabling agents to safely and securely act on a consumer’s behalf requires an open, ecosystem-wide approach. Visa is committed to aligning closely with global standards bodies such as the IETF, OpenID Foundation, and EMVCo, as well as ecosystem partners, to ensure that the Trusted Agent Protocol complements other recently announced protocols, such as the Agentic Commerce Protocol. Visa is also collaborating with Coinbase to align on interoperability with x402.

Built upon the foundational HTTP Message Signatures standard and aligned with WebAuthn, the Trusted Agent Protocol enables merchants and agents to establish trust using existing web infrastructure—with minimal user experience (UX) changes required on merchant websites or checkout pages—and can be extended to non-web messaging protocols.