Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol to authenticate AI shopping agents and help prevent fraud across Akamai Cloud, strengthening the trust layer in agentic commerce
Akamai Technologies, Inc. , the cybersecurity and cloud computing company that powers and protects business online, announced a strategic collaboration with Visa to bring stronger identity, user recognition, and security controls to the emerging world of agentic commerce. Through its integration of Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s edge-based behavioral intelligence, user recognition, and bot and abuse protection, the companies will deliver the identity, authentication, and fraud controls required to let merchants confidently welcome AI agents with commerce intent into their digital storefronts.
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“Agentic commerce is unlocking an entirely new wave of digital interactions, but it can only scale if every player in the ecosystem can trust the agents participating in it,” said Jack Forestell, Visa Chief Product & Strategy Officer
As autonomous AI agents increasingly browse, compare, and purchase on behalf of consumers, merchants face a new array of challenges. Merchants must now be able to differentiate this new type of legitimate automated traffic by authenticating the agent, identifying the user interacting with it, and ensuring the interaction is safe and trusted. Without this trust layer, merchants risk losing control of personalization, security, and the consumer relationship.
Through the Trusted Agent Protocol’s agent authentication framework and Akamai’s edge-based behavioral intelligence and user recognition, merchants gain access to precise, real-time insight into AI agent activity before it touches sensitive systems. This unified approach enables merchants to confidently differentiate trusted AI agents from malicious bots – unlocking the potential of agentic commerce. With Trusted Agent Protocol supported across Akamai Cloud, the world’s most distributed cloud platform, merchants can operate at the speed and scale agentic commerce demands.
“The promise of agentic commerce hinges on recognition: the fundamental ability to trust an agent acting on someone’s behalf,” said Patrick Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy, Akamai Technologies. “By combining Visa Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s deep user recognition and threat intelligence, we’re working to solve the dual-identity challenge that’s crucial to AI commerce. We prove both who the agent is and, critically, who it represents. This is what transforms AI agents from novelties into trusted economic actors.”
“Agentic commerce is unlocking an entirely new wave of digital interactions, but it can only scale if every player in the ecosystem can trust the agents participating in it,” said Jack Forestell, Visa Chief Product & Strategy Officer. “By collaborating with Akamai to deploy Trusted Agent Protocol, we’re delivering the real-time intelligence merchants need to support AI-driven experiences without introducing new risk. This is how we help the industry move confidently into the next era of commerce.”
According to Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report, AI-powered bot traffic has surged 300% over the past year. The commerce industry alone experienced more than 25 billion AI bot requests during a two-month period. As agent-generated traffic accelerates, the risk surface expands and the need for verifiable identity becomes critical.
Trusted Agent Protocol addresses this need directly by helping to ensure that every AI agent paying with a Visa credential is trusted, authenticated, and operating as intended. Using industry standard web infrastructure, Trusted Agent Protocol allows agents to transmit information to merchants to show that the agent is approved for its specific shopping mission, provide visibility into the consumer making the transaction, and securely pass payment information through a merchant’s preferred checkout flow. Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to scale with minimal infrastructure and user experience (UX) changes, making it easy for 175 million Visa accepting merchant locations around the globe to adopt agentic commerce – without compromising security, control, or trust.
Akamai and Visa are working together to help merchants:
- Clearly identify a legitimate AI agent and its intent:
Visa Trusted Agent Protocol helps merchants differentiate whether an agent is browsing or paying, while Akamai strengthens that signal with real-time behavioral and network intelligence to detect anomalies. - Confidently link the agent to the underlying user:
Trusted Agent Protocol helps agents pass pertinent information to connect each verified agent to the consumer it represents, and Akamai preserves that identity through edge-based user recognition, maintaining the risk posture, trust signals, and account context merchants rely on to detect and prevent fraud. - Enable secure, predictable payment interactions:
Trusted Agent Protocol assists agents with conveying payment information in the manner a merchant expects an agent to pay, from network tokens to micropayments. Akamai reinforces these flows with end-to-end protection, validating agent authenticity and helping to prevent fraud or abuse before it impacts the transaction.
Nine of the world’s top 10 retailers rely on Akamai to power and protect digital commerce, supporting fast, secure, and seamless shopping experiences. Trusted by thousands of companies worldwide, Akamai helps e-commerce leaders handle peak traffic, accelerate performance, and safeguard online storefronts at global scale.
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