AI Agents Disrupt Traditional Payments, Raise Questions on Control and Liability
The Agentic Payments Alliance has brought together major players from traditional payments and crypto to develop standards for AI agents making payments on behalf of humans.
A critical question remains: how do you verify an AI agent, determine what it is allowed to do, and establish who is responsible when something goes wrong?
Vilhelm German notes that 'agents can already make decisions and initiate payments, but the rules around them haven’t caught up.' The industry needs a reliable way to know who an agent represents, what it can do, and who is accountable.
Mastercard has introduced Agent Pay, which uses tokenized credentials to identify trusted AI agents. Visa is developing its Intelligent Commerce platform, including tools such as Agent Score and an agent registry. Coinbase and Cloudflare have launched the x402 protocol for stablecoin payments between machines.