Akamai Technologies and Visa have entered into a collaboration aimed at addressing emerging security and trust challenges associated with agentic commerce, as autonomous AI agents increasingly interact with online retail and payment systems on behalf of consumers.
The collaboration centres on the integration of Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s edge-based behavioural analysis, user recognition and bot mitigation capabilities. The combined approach is intended to provide merchants with mechanisms to authenticate AI agents, associate them with the underlying consumer, and assess whether interactions are legitimate before they reach sensitive commerce and payment systems.
As AI-driven agents take on tasks such as browsing, price comparison and purchasing, merchants face growing difficulty distinguishing trusted automated activity from malicious bot traffic. Without effective controls, these interactions can weaken fraud detection, disrupt personalisation and increase exposure to account abuse and payment fraud.
Under the proposed model, the Trusted Agent Protocol provides an agent authentication framework, while Akamai’s platform analyses behavioural and network signals at the edge to assess risk in real time. This allows merchants to determine whether an AI agent is authorised, what task it is performing, and whether the transaction should be allowed to proceed.
Akamai has noted that the volume of AI-generated traffic continues to rise sharply. Its 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse research indicates a significant increase in AI-powered bot activity, with the commerce sector experiencing tens of billions of automated requests in short timeframes. As agent-driven interactions scale, the distinction between legitimate automation and abuse has become increasingly difficult to manage using traditional controls.
Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to allow AI agents using Visa credentials to present verifiable information about their purpose and the consumer they represent, while enabling payment to flow through existing merchant checkout processes. The protocol relies on standard web infrastructure and is intended to be adopted without major changes to merchant systems or user experience.
The collaboration seeks to give merchants greater confidence in supporting agent-driven interactions by maintaining visibility into agent intent, preserving consumer identity context and applying consistent fraud controls across automated and human-led transactions.
Akamai and Visa said the initiative reflects a broader shift in digital commerce, where identity, authentication and behavioural verification are becoming foundational requirements as AI agents begin to participate directly in economic activity.
