Cloudflare Partners with Visa, Mastercard, American Express for Agentic Commerce (www.cloudflare.com)

Cloudflare announced an industry collaboration with Visa, Mastercard and American Express to create an authentication layer for "agentic commerce"—AI agents that shop and transact autonomously for users. The companies have integrated Web Bot Auth (a bot/agent authentication specification proposed earlier this year) into new flows: Cloudflare and Visa co-developed the Trusted Agent Protocol (adopted into Visa Intelligent Commerce), Mastercard is adding Web Bot Auth to Mastercard Agent Pay, and American Express will leverage the protocol in its agentic program. Cloudflare says AI agents built with its Agents SDK will soon be able to authenticate and transact at millions of merchants worldwide; other payments and platform partners (e.g., Adyen, Shopify, Microsoft) have contributed feedback. Technically, Web Bot Auth plus the Trusted Agent Protocol lets merchants verify an agent’s identity and intent, preserve customer-account relationships when an agent acts for a user, and accept multiple payment types (credit, debit, crypto) from authenticated agents. The initiative aims to prevent fraudulent bot traffic while enabling legitimate agent-driven purchases at Internet scale, and ties into broader efforts (Agent Payments Protocol, Cloudflare NET Dollar, x402 Foundation with Coinbase) to standardize agent-to-merchant payments. For the AI/ML community this accelerates real-world deployment of autonomous agents but raises operational, security and privacy trade-offs around verification, consent and fraud mitigation as agentic commerce scales.