Mastercard has unveiled Verifiable Intent, a new open, standards-based trust framework co-developed with Google and designed specifically for agentic commerce – a world where artificial intelligence (AI) systems not only assist shoppers, but actively plan, decide and complete purchases autonomously.
The core problem Verifiable Intent aims to solve is visibility: when a consumer delegates a purchase to an AI agent, the clear ‘click buy’ or ‘tap to pay’ moment that traditionally signals intent disappears. Pablo Fourez, Chief Digital Officer of Mastercard, said this poses a new challenge for all parties involved: consumers need to be assured that their instructions have been followed, merchants need confirmation that an agent is authorized to purchase, and issuers need to be able to distinguish legitimate activity from fraud.
To address this, Verifiable Intent creates a tamper-resistant, cryptographic record of what a user has authorized when an AI agent acts on his or her behalf – linking identity, intent and action to a single, privacy-preserving audit trail.
The framework uses Selective Disclosure, a privacy control technique, to ensure that only the minimum necessary information is shared between parties and only when necessary, allowing merchants and issuers to verify transactions without access to sensitive consumer data.
It uses commonly accepted standards from the FIDO Alliance, EMVCo, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the World Wide Web Consortium, and is designed to work with agentic protocols, devices, wallets, and platforms. Mastercard says Verifiable Intent will be integrated into its Agent Pay APIs in the coming months.
Crypto Rails Join the fight
However, not everyone sees traditional payment networks as the right foundation for AI-driven commerce, highlighting a growing debate over whether AI agents will ultimately transact through established networks like Mastercard or bypass them entirely in favor of crypto-native infrastructure.
“Soon there will be more AI agents than humans transacting. They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet. Think about it,” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote today on X.
In September, EigenCloud, Ethereum’s largest recovery protocol with a total value of nearly $9 billion, announced a partnership with Google Cloud to serve as the verifiable backbone for AI agent payments.
Meanwhile, the Ethereum Foundation launched a dedicated AI initiative called the dAI team, with the mission to make Ethereum the preferred settlement and coordination layer for the emerging “machine economy.”
The following month, attention turned to x402 protocols, which enable payment systems for AI agents and expand the usability of agentic AI-led financing.
Taken together, these developments paint a picture of an industry racing to solve the same core problem from two very different directions. Mastercard and traditional financial institutions are building layers of trust on top of existing payment rails, while crypto proponents are betting that blockchain infrastructure is better suited to a world where AI agents are first-class economic actors.