Visa just launched a protocol to secure the AI shopping boom — here’s what it means for merchants

Visa is introducing a new security framework designed to solve one of the thorniest problems emerging in artificial intelligence-powered commerce: how retailers can tell the difference between legitimate AI shopping assistants and the malicious bots that plague their websites.

The payments giant unveiled its Trusted Agent Protocol on Tuesday, establishing what it describes as foundational infrastructure for "agentic commerce" — a term for the rapidly growing practice of consumers delegating shopping tasks to AI agents that can search products, compare prices, and complete purchases autonomously.

The protocol enables merchants to cryptographically verify that an AI agent browsing their site is authorized and trustworthy, rather than a bot designed to scrape pricing data, test stolen credit cards, or carry out other fraudulent activities.

The launch comes as AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites has exploded by more than 4,700% over the past year, according to data from Adobe cited by Visa. That dramatic surge has created an acute challenge for merchants whose existing bot detection systems — designed to block automated traffic — now risk accidentally blocking legitimate AI shoppers along with bad actors.

"Merchants need additional tools that provide them with greater insight and transparency into agentic commerce activities to ensure they can participate safely," said Rubail Birwadker, Visa's Global Head of Growth, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. "Without common standards, potential risks include ecosystem fragmentation and the proliferation of closed loop models."

The stakes are substantial. While 85% of shoppers who have used AI to shop report improved experiences, merchants face the prospect of either turning away legitimate AI-powered customers or exposing themselves to sophisticated bot attacks. Visa's own data shows the company prevented $40 billion in fraudulent activity between October 2022 and September 2023, nearly double the previous year, much of it involving AI-powered enumeration attacks where bots systematically test combinations of card numbers until finding valid credentials.

Inside the cryptographic handshake: How Visa verifies AI shopping agents

Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol operates through what Birwadker describes as a "cryptographic trust handshake" between merchants and approved AI agents. The system works in three steps:

First, AI agents must be approved and onboarded through Visa's Intelligent Commerce program, where they undergo vetting to meet trust and reliability standards. Each approved agent receives a unique digital signature key — essentially a cryptographic credential that proves its identity.

When an approved agent visits a merchant's website, it creates a digital signature using its key and transmits three categories of information: Agent Intent (indicating the agent is trusted and intends to retrieve product details or make a purchase), Consumer Recognition (data showing whether the underlying consumer has an existing account with the merchant), and Payment Information (optional payment data to support checkout).

Merchants or their infrastructure providers, such as content delivery networks, then validate these digital signatures against Visa's registry of approved agents. "Upon proper validation of these fields, the merchant can confirm the signature is a trusted agent," Birwadker explained.

Crucially, Visa designed the protocol to require minimal changes to existing merchant infrastructure. Built on the HTTP Message Signature standard and aligned with Web Both Auth, the protocol works with existing web infrastructure without requiring merchants to overhaul their checkout pages. "This is no-code functionality," Birwadker emphasized, though merchants may need to integrate with Visa's Developer Center to access the verification system.

The race for AI commerce standards: Visa faces competition from Google, OpenAI, and Stripe

Visa developed the protocol in collaboration with Cloudflare, the web infrastructure and security company that already provides bot management services to millions of websites. The partnership reflects Visa's recognition that solving bot verification requires cooperation across the entire web stack, not just the payments layer.

"Trusted Agent Protocol supplements traditional bot management by providing merchants insights that enable agentic commerce," Birwadker said. "Agents are providing additional context they otherwise would not, including what it intends to do, who the underlying consumer is, and payment information."

The protocol arrives as multiple technology giants race to establish competing standards for AI commerce. Google recently introduced its Agent Protocol for Payments (AP2), while OpenAI and Stripe have discussed their own approaches to enabling AI agents to make purchases. Microsoft, Shopify, Adyen, Ant International, Checkout.com, Cybersource, Elavon, Fiserv, Nuvei, and Worldpay provided feedback during Trusted Agent Protocol's development, according to Visa.

When asked how Visa's protocol relates to these competing efforts, Birwadker struck a collaborative tone. "Both Google's AP2 and Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol are working toward the same goal of building trust in agent-initiated payments," he said. "We are engaged with Google, OpenAI, and Stripe and are looking to create compatibility across the ecosystem."

Visa says it is working with global standards bodies including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), OpenID Foundation, and EMVCo to ensure the protocol can eventually become interoperable with other emerging standards. "While these specifications apply to the Visa network in this initial phase, enabling agents to safely and securely act on a consumer's behalf requires an open, ecosystem-wide approach," Birwadker noted.

Who pays when AI agents go rogue? Unanswered questions about liability and authorization

The protocol raises important questions about authorization and liability when AI agents make purchases on behalf of consumers. If an agent completes an unauthorized transaction — perhaps misunderstanding a user's intent or exceeding its delegated authority — who bears responsibility?

Birwadker emphasized that the protocol helps merchants "leverage this information to enable experiences tied to existing consumer relationships and more secure checkout," but he did not provide specific details about how disputes would be handled when agents make unauthorized purchases. Visa's existing fraud protection and chargeback systems would presumably apply, though the company has not yet published detailed guidance on agent-initiated transaction disputes.

The protocol also places Visa in the position of gatekeeper for the emerging agentic commerce ecosystem. Because Visa determines which AI agents get approved for the Intelligent Commerce program and receive cryptographic credentials, the company effectively controls which agents merchants can easily trust. "Agents are approved and onboarded through the Visa Intelligent Commerce program, ensuring they meet our standards for trust and reliability," Birwadker said, though he did not detail the specific criteria agents must meet or whether Visa charges fees for approval.

This gatekeeping role could prove contentious, particularly if Visa's approval process favors large technology companies over startups, or if the company faces pressure to block agents from competitors or politically controversial entities. Visa declined to provide details about how many agents it has approved so far or how long the vetting process typically takes.

Visa's legal battles and the long road to merchant adoption

The protocol launch comes at a complex moment for Visa, which continues to navigate significant legal and regulatory challenges even as its core business remains robust. The company's latest earnings report for the third quarter of fiscal year 2025 showed a 10% increase in net revenues to $9.2 billion, driven by resilient consumer spending and strong growth in cross-border transaction volume. For the full fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, Visa processed 289 billion transactions, with a total payments volume of $15.2 trillion.

However, the company's legal headwinds have intensified. In July 2025, a federal judge rejected a landmark $30 billion settlement that Visa and Mastercard had reached with merchants over long-disputed credit card swipe fees, sending the parties back to the negotiating table and extending the long-running legal battle.

Simultaneously, Visa remains under investigation by the Department of Justice over its rules for routing debit card transactions, with regulators scrutinizing whether the company's practices unlawfully limit merchant choice and stifle competition. These domestic challenges are mirrored abroad, where European regulators have continued their own antitrust investigations into the fee structures of both Visa and its primary competitor, Mastercard.

Against this backdrop of regulatory pressure, Birwadker acknowledged that adoption of the Trusted Agent Protocol will take time. "As agentic commerce continues to rise, we recognize that consumer trust is still in its early stages," he said. "That's why our focus through 2025 is on building foundational credibility and demonstrating real-world value."

The protocol is available immediately in Visa's Developer Center and on GitHub, with agent onboarding already active and merchant integration resources available. But Birwadker declined to provide specific targets for how many merchants might adopt the protocol by the end of 2026. "Adoption is aligned with the momentum we're already seeing," he said. "The launch of our protocol marks another big step — it's not just a technical milestone, but a signal that the industry is beginning to unify."

Industry analysts say merchant adoption will likely depend on how quickly agentic commerce grows as a percentage of overall e-commerce. While AI-driven traffic has surged dramatically, much of that consists of agents browsing and researching rather than completing purchases. If AI agents begin accounting for a significant share of completed transactions, merchants will face stronger incentives to adopt verification systems like Visa's protocol.

From fraud detection to AI gatekeeping: Visa's $10 billion bet on artificial intelligence

Visa's move reflects broader strategic bets on AI across the financial services industry. The company has invested $10 billion in technology over the past five years to reduce fraud and increase network security, with AI and machine learning central to those efforts. Visa's fraud detection system analyzes over 500 different attributes for each transaction, using AI models to assign real-time risk scores to the 300 billion annual transactions flowing through its network.

"Every single one of those transactions has been processed by AI," James Mirfin, Visa's global head of risk and identity solutions, said in a July 2024 CNBC interview discussing the company's fraud prevention efforts. "If you see a new type of fraud happening, our model will see that, it will catch it, it will score those transactions as high risk and then our customers can decide not to approve those transactions."

The company has also moved aggressively into new payment territories beyond its core card business. In January 2025, Visa partnered with Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter) to provide the infrastructure for a digital wallet and peer-to-peer payment service called the X Money Account, competing with services like Venmo and Zelle. That deal marked Visa's first major partnership in the social media payments space and reflected the company's recognition that payment flows are increasingly happening outside traditional e-commerce channels.

The agentic commerce protocol represents an extension of this strategy — an attempt to ensure Visa remains central to payment flows even as the mechanics of shopping shift from direct human interaction to AI intermediation. Jack Forestell, Visa's Chief Product & Strategy Officer, framed the protocol in expansive terms: "We believe the entire payments ecosystem has a responsibility to ensure sellers trust AI agents with the same confidence they place in their most valued customers and networks."

The coming battle for control of AI shopping

The real test for Visa's protocol won't be technical — it will be political. As AI agents become a larger force in retail, whoever controls the verification infrastructure controls access to hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce. Visa's position as gatekeeper gives it enormous leverage, but also makes it a target.

Merchants chafing under Visa's existing fee structure and facing multiple antitrust investigations may resist ceding even more power to the payments giant. Competitors like Google and OpenAI, each with their own ambitions in commerce, have little incentive to let Visa dictate standards. Regulators already scrutinizing Visa's market dominance will surely examine whether its agent approval process unfairly advantages certain players.

And there's a deeper question lurking beneath the technical specifications and corporate partnerships: In an economy increasingly mediated by AI, who decides which algorithms get to spend our money? Visa is making an aggressive bid to be that arbiter, wrapping its answer in the language of security and interoperability. Whether merchants, consumers, and regulators accept that proposition will determine not just the fate of the Trusted Agent Protocol, but the structure of AI-powered commerce itself.

For now, Visa is moving forward with the confidence of a company that has weathered disruption before. But in the emerging world of agentic commerce, being too trusted might prove just as dangerous as not being trusted enough.