Akamai and Visa are working together to address security and identity challenges emerging as AI agents begin to transact on behalf of consumers.
Under the collaboration, Akamai is integrating Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol into its cloud and security platform to help merchants authenticate AI shopping agents, identify the consumers they represent, and distinguish legitimate agent-driven activity from fraud or malicious automation. The effort targets what both companies describe as a growing trust gap presenting a hurdle for agentic commerce as it moves from experimentation toward broader deployment.
As autonomous agents browse, compare products, and complete purchases, merchants must be able to recognize when traffic is generated by an approved agent rather than a traditional bot. According to the companies, the combined approach uses Visa’s agent authentication framework alongside Akamai’s edge-based behavioral intelligence, user recognition, and bot mitigation to evaluate agent activity before it reaches sensitive commerce systems.
“The promise of agentic commerce hinges on recognition: the fundamental ability to trust an agent acting on someone’s behalf,” said Patrick Sullivan, chief technology officer, security strategy, at Akamai Technologies. “By combining Visa Trusted Agent Protocol with Akamai’s deep user recognition and threat intelligence, we’re working to solve the dual-identity challenge that’s crucial to AI commerce. We prove both who the agent is and, critically, who it represents. This is what transforms AI agents from novelties into trusted economic actors.”
The announcement comes amid a sharp rise in automated traffic. Akamai’s 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report found that AI-powered bot traffic increased 300 percent year over year, with the commerce sector alone seeing more than 25 billion AI bot requests over a two-month period.
Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to let AI agents securely signal their authorization, intent, and payment credentials using standard web infrastructure, while minimizing changes to existing checkout experiences. Akamai and Visa said the goal is to enable merchants to support agent-driven shopping without sacrificing fraud controls, customer trust, or operational visibility as agentic commerce scales.