FIDO Alliance, Google, and Mastercard Launch Working Groups to Standardize AI Agent Payments

The FIDO Alliance, an authentication-focused industry association, announced the formation of two working groups to craft industry standards for validating and protecting payments and other transactions initiated by artificial-intelligence agents. Google and Mastercard will contribute open-source tools, aiming for a baseline that can be adopted across sectors. The working groups will also explore mechanisms that resist phishing and unauthorized instruction.

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Existing digital threats—malware, online impersonation, account takeovers—already strain users. The rise of agentic AI, where software agents act on users’ behalf, introduces a risk vector that legacy security models were not designed to address, prompting calls for new standards.

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The effort is led by the FIDO Alliance, with CEO Andrew Shikiar guiding the working groups. Google contributes its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a cryptographic method to verify user intent. Mastercard co-develops the Verifiable Intent framework to let users securely authorize agent actions.

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FIDO Alliance says the standards will provide a protective baseline, include cryptographic tools to confirm legitimate agent behavior, and embed privacy-preserving frameworks for transaction validation. Representatives stress accelerating the process because agentic AI adoption is rapid. The framework will also support cross-industry interoperability, enabling diverse services to adopt the same security model.

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Adopting interoperable standards aims to block agent hijacking, rogue transactions, and disputes while ensuring transparency and accountability. Secure AI-agent authorization could boost consumer confidence in agentic commerce, avoiding a repeat of insecure password-based foundations.

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The working groups will draft specifications, test open-source tools, and seek industry consensus. Although no rollout date was given, all participants emphasized the urgency of delivering widely adoptable standards for the digital payments ecosystem. The groups intend to work rapidly to produce draft specifications for industry review.

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“Agents are becoming more and more common, they're moving into mainstream use, but preexisting models aren’t necessarily designed for this sort of paradigm—they weren't built to contemplate actions performed on a user’s behalf.” — Andrew Shikiar, CEO, FIDO Alliance

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“If we look back on our work in recent years on the massive problem space of passwords, that originated decades ago. The security foundation for what became our connected economy wasn’t fit for purpose. Now we’re at a similar precipice with agentic agents and agentic interactions, agentic commerce where we have an opportunity to not go down that same path and establish some foundational principles that will allow for more trusted interactions.” — Andrew Shikiar, CEO, FIDO Alliance

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