Akamai Technologies and Visa have partnered to address security and trust challenges as artificial intelligence agents become more active in online shopping.

The collaboration integrates Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol across Akamai Cloud, combining agent authentication with Akamai’s edge-based behavioural intelligence, user recognition, and bot and abuse protection.

The aim is to help merchants verify AI shopping agents and reduce fraud risks by identifying trusted activity at the network edge before it reaches merchant systems.

As agent-driven traffic grows, merchants face challenges distinguishing legitimate AI agents from malicious bots while maintaining secure transactions, personalisation, and customer relationships.

“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.”

said Patrick Sullivan, Chief Technology Officer, Security Strategy, Akamai Technologies.

By validating both the AI agent and the consumer it represents, the approach is intended to give merchants real-time visibility into agent activity before it reaches sensitive systems.

Akamai said its 2025 Digital Fraud and Abuse Report showed AI-powered bot traffic surged 300 percent over the past year, with the commerce sector recording more than 25 billion AI bot requests over a two-month period.

As agent-generated traffic accelerates, the need for verifiable identity and authentication has become more critical.

“By collaborating with Akamai to deploy Trusted Agent Protocol, we’re delivering the real-time intelligence merchants need to support AI-driven experiences without introducing new risk.

This is how we help the industry move confidently into the next era of commerce.”

said Jack Forestell, Visa Chief Product & Strategy Officer. “

Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol is designed to ensure AI agents using Visa credentials are authorised for specific shopping tasks and can securely pass payment information, including network tokens and micropayments, through existing merchant checkout flows.

Built on standard web infrastructure, the protocol is designed to scale with minimal changes for merchants and is intended for use across Visa’s network of 175 million accepting locations worldwide.

Akamai said the deployment across its cloud platform, which supports nine of the world’s top 10 global retailers, is expected to help merchants support agentic commerce while managing security and fraud risks.