Mastercard announced Verifiable Intent, a new open standards-based trust framework co-developed with Google. It is specifically designed for “agency commerce,” a world in which artificial intelligence (AI) systems not only assist shoppers, but also proactively plan, decide, and complete purchases autonomously.
The core problem that Verifiable Intent seeks to solve is visibility. When a consumer delegates a purchase to an AI agent, the traditionally clear “click to buy” or “tap to pay” moment that signals intent disappears. Pablo Forest, Mastercard’s chief digital officer, argues that this poses new challenges for everyone involved. Consumers need assurance that instructions have been followed, sellers need confirmation that their agents are authorized to make purchases, and issuers need to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent activity.
To address this, Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-proof, encrypted record of what users approve when an AI agent acts on their behalf, linking identity, intent, and actions into a single privacy-preserving audit trail.
The framework uses selective disclosure, a privacy management technique, to ensure that only the minimum necessary information is shared between parties and only when necessary, allowing merchants and publishers to verify transactions without accessing sensitive consumer data.
It leverages widely adopted standards from the FIDO Alliance, EMVCo, Internet Engineering Task Force, and World Wide Web Consortium and is designed to work across agent protocols, devices, wallets, and platforms. According to Mastercard, Verifiable Intent will be integrated into the Agent Pay API in the coming months.
Crypto rails join the fray
However, not everyone believes traditional payment networks are an appropriate foundation for AI-driven commerce, highlighting the growing debate over whether AI agents will ultimately conduct transactions through existing networks like Mastercard’s, or bypass networks altogether in favor of crypto-native infrastructure.
“Soon there will be more AI agents than humans making transactions. They won’t be able to open bank accounts, but they will be able to own crypto wallets. Think about it,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote in a post on X today.
In September, EigenCloud, Ethereum’s largest restaking protocol with nearly $9 billion locked in total, announced a partnership with Google Cloud to serve as a verifiable backbone for payments powered by AI agents.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation has launched a dedicated AI initiative called the dAI Team, with the clear mission of making Ethereum the preferred payment and reconciliation layer for the emerging “machine economy.”
The following month, the x402 protocol gained attention. This enables AI agent payment systems and increases the practicality of agent-driven AI-driven finance.
Taken together, these developments paint a picture of an industry competing to solve the same core problem from two very different directions. While Mastercard and traditional finance are building a layer of trust on top of existing payment rails, crypto advocates are betting that blockchain infrastructure is better suited for a world where AI agents are first-class economic agents.