FIDO Alliance pushes agent safeguards
- The FIDO Alliance said April 28 it is creating standards for AI agents, with Google and Mastercard contributing payment and authentication frameworks. - Google donated its Agent Payments Protocol, while Mastercard and Google backed “verifiable intent” checks so agents can prove a user approved a purchase. - Retail pilots are rising as trust lags: 43% are testing shopping agents, while 95% of consumers report concerns. (pymnts.com)
An AI shopping agent is software that can browse, compare and buy things for you, which turns a chatbot into something closer to a delegated spender. (wired.com) (fidoalliance.org) The FIDO Alliance said on April 28 that it is launching an Agentic Authentication Technical Working Group to write standards for how those agents identify themselves and act for users. (fidoalliance.org) The group is also starting work on payment frameworks for agent-led commerce, after Google donated its Agent Payments Protocol to FIDO and Mastercard contributed work on “verifiable intent.” (blog.google) (fidoalliance.org) “Verifiable intent” is a cryptographic receipt: it bundles the shopper’s approval, the agent’s identity and the transaction details so a merchant or bank can check what was actually authorized. (fidoalliance.org) That addresses a basic payments problem. Card systems were built for a person clicking “buy,” not for an autonomous agent deciding when to place an order, switch merchants or retry a failed payment. (wired.com) (fidoalliance.org) Retailers are already testing the model. PYMNTS reported April 28 that 43% of retailers are piloting autonomous AI shopping agents, and 81% said they trust AI to operate autonomously when guardrails are in place. (pymnts.com) Consumers are more cautious. The same PYMNTS report said 95% of consumers had at least one concern about agentic commerce, and 50% said fraud protections would make them trust it more. (pymnts.com) Mastercard has been building its own agentic payments stack in parallel. In April 2025, it introduced Agent Pay, a program meant to let AI agents make purchases with controls for issuers, merchants and users. (mastercard.com) Google has also been pushing open building blocks rather than a single closed checkout system, arguing that agentic commerce will need shared rules across merchants, wallets and AI platforms. (blog.google) The immediate fight is over who gets to define trust before agent shopping scales: the model makers building assistants, the card networks moving money, or the authentication groups writing the rules both sides use. (wired.com) (fidoalliance.org)
