Who this is for: anyone who sells online and has been asked what the card networks' agent announcements mean for their business, and would like an answer shorter than a press release.
Shanghai and Singapore, 10 September 2026. Ant International, Mastercard and Visa said they have begun work on a shared Know-Your-Agent framework: a way for card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces to recognise an AI agent that another of them has already verified, instead of each running its own check from scratch. If you sell online, this is the first time the three companies that move most of the world's consumer payments have agreed that the thing arriving at your checkout might be software, and that it should carry an identity you can trust.
What it means for you, in one sentence: within a year or two, the question "is this agent allowed to pay?" will have an answer your payment provider can read, and the question "what may this agent see and on what terms?" will still be yours to answer.
What the networks said
The three companies each already run their own scheme for verifying agents: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent, and Ant International's Agentic Mobile Protocol, which launched in April. The new framework bridges them. According to Ant International's release, it rests on three elements: cross-network operator traceability (who is behind the agent), shared certification requirements (what an agent has to demonstrate to be trusted), and continuous transaction monitoring (watching its behaviour over time, not just at registration).
The practical promise is registration once. As Jiang-Ming Yang, Ant International's chief innovation officer, put it to CNBC: "If an agent registers with Ant, they don't need to register again with Visa, Mastercard." Pablo Fourez, Mastercard's chief digital officer, called interoperability across these frameworks "essential to making agentic commerce work at scale." Visa's Rubail Birwadker said collaborations like this "can help create more consistency, better accountability, and greater confidence across the payments ecosystem as AI-driven transactions become more common."
The release is careful about what the framework doesn't do. Being recognised by another network does not grant payment authorisation. Each network keeps its own verification, approval and risk decisions. And the companies' own projection frames the stakes: three to five trillion dollars of global consumer commerce orchestrated by agents by 2030.
What changes for a seller, and what doesn't
Three things change. First, identity becomes portable. Today an agent that wants to pay you by card is, from your side, indistinguishable from a bot or a person, and your fraud tooling treats it accordingly. A recognised agent credential gives your payment provider a signal to act on: this is a registered agent, operated by a known entity, with a behaviour history. Second, accountability gets a home. Operator traceability means that when an agent transaction goes wrong, there is a named party behind it. Third, the standards will be written by the networks, which means your acquirer and your checkout provider will surface them to you; you won't have to integrate three protocols yourself.
What doesn't change is the part that's actually your decision. The framework tells you who the agent is. It doesn't tell you which of your products an agent may see, at what price, under which terms, or what happens when an automated purchase goes wrong and the person behind the agent says they never asked for it. Those are commercial questions, and no card network is going to answer them for you.
The other thing that doesn't change is that card rails are one way agents pay. Per-call payment rails that don't involve a card at all already work today, where a vendor publishes a machine-readable price and an agent pays it in the same request. The Know-Your-Agent work covers the card and wallet networks; a seller with a machine-readable storefront isn't waiting on it.
Your next ninety days
Decide which products an agent may buy without a person on your side, and write the terms down in a place a machine can read. Ask your payment provider when it will surface a verified-agent signal and what it will let you do with it (accept, step up, decline). Work out who covers a disputed agent purchase under your existing terms, because that question arrives before any standard does. And don't treat the framework as a reason to wait; it's a reason to expect the traffic.
The announcement, summarised
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Date and dateline | 10 September 2026, Shanghai and Singapore (Ant International release) |
| Parties | Ant International, Mastercard, Visa |
| What | Collaboration on a Know-Your-Agent (KYA) interoperability framework |
| Elements | Cross-network operator traceability; shared certification requirements; continuous transaction monitoring |
| Bridges | Visa Trusted Agent Protocol; Mastercard Verifiable Intent; Ant International Agentic Mobile Protocol (launched April 2026) |
| Does not | Grant payment authorisation; each network keeps its own verification and decisioning |
| Projection | US$3 to 5 trillion of consumer commerce orchestrated by agents by 2030 (the companies' figure) |
| Context | Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines, launched 10 June 2026, with 30+ partners including Stripe, Adyen, Coinbase and Cloudflare |
What this doesn't tell you
No timeline for publishing the framework was given, and no merchant-facing product was announced. "Begun collaboration" is the operative phrase. The trillion-dollar projection is the companies' own and we haven't seen its method. Nothing here describes how disputes on agent purchases will be handled; that remains under existing scheme rules until someone says otherwise.
Questions people ask
Do I need to do anything to accept payments from AI agents now?
Not on the card side; your provider will surface agent signals as the networks roll them out. On your own side, decide what agents may buy and on what terms, and make that readable by a machine.
Will a registered agent be able to charge my customers without their say?
Recognition isn't authorisation. The networks keep their approval decisions, and the person behind the agent still has to have authorised it under the scheme's rules and the platform's terms.
Is this the same as Google's AP2 or Mastercard's Agent Pay?
No. Those are payment protocols and products. This is an agreement to recognise each other's agent verification, so an agent doesn't have to be vetted three times.
Sources
- Ant International, Mastercard and Visa initiate collaboration on Know-Your-Agent interoperability to scale agentic commerce, Ant International, 10 September 2026. The primary source.
- Ant International partners with Visa, Mastercard on developing AI payments, CNBC, 10 September 2026.
- Ant International, Mastercard, Visa to align on Know-Your-Agent standards, TechNode Global, 11 September 2026.
- Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines, Mastercard, 10 June 2026.