Mastercard is testing a transaction-intelligence service in the United States that estimates whether a payment was initiated by an artificial-intelligence agent, as it expands the trust framework supporting its Agent Pay program.
Agent Pay is Mastercard’s approach to payments made by AI assistants acting on a user’s instructions. The expanded framework covers five areas: identity, intent, controls, execution and intelligence. It is designed to establish who is acting, what they are authorized to do and how a transaction should be assessed.
The first intelligence service assesses the probability that an AI agent initiated a transaction. Mastercard is testing it in the U.S., with the aim of giving payment participants additional information about activity that can otherwise resemble ordinary online purchases.
The company plans to add further signals, including agent behavior, merchant risk, transaction patterns, credential risk and consumer propensity. These are planned extensions of the service, rather than capabilities Mastercard says are already generally available.
Mastercard is also exploring collaboration with Cloudflare to combine web-level and payment-network signals in a privacy-preserving environment. The work would connect information about online activity with the signals used to assess a payment.
Skyfire is contributing agent identity verification through its Know Your Agent approach. That work focuses on identifying trusted agents before they participate in transactions, alongside the authorization and risk controls used in payment processing.
Mastercard and Google previously launched Verifiable Intent, an open-source framework that uses cryptography to connect a person’s instructions to an AI agent’s actions and the resulting transaction.
That framework supports selective disclosure and was developed with reference to existing identity and payment standards. Mastercard has described integration with Agent Pay as part of its development plans, including compatibility with Google’s agentic-commerce protocols.
Skyfire has separately partnered with Fastly to bring verified agent identity to edge-network services. That integration combines verification of agents’ identity, authorization and ability to pay with controls that distinguish them from unwanted automated traffic.
In Mastercard’s current test, the intelligence service provides a likelihood assessment about the origin of a transaction. The broader trust framework also addresses the user’s intent and the agent’s authority, keeping transaction identification and permission to spend as separate parts of the payment process.
Sources: Mastercard
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
