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Insights and Expertise

The trust gap in Where the ecosystem has focused

The industry's response to agentic commerce risk has
AI commerce been rapid, coordinated and almost entirely directed at
the agent side of the transaction. Visa's Trusted Agent
Protocol, Mastercard's Agent Pay and American Express's
agentic developer kit all address the same question: how
does a merchant know that the AI agent at checkout is a
legitimate, consumer-authorized buyer? Visa uses cryp-
tographic signatures in HTTP headers; Mastercard binds
payment credentials to a specific agent and consent poli-
cy; AmEx covers erroneous purchases made by registered
agents. The agent authentication problem these tools solve
is real, and the contribution made by these initiatives has
moved the industry forward.

The platform operators have made parallel progress.
OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, built with Stripe,
defined how agents interact with merchant catalogs.
Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, launched in Janu-
By Chris Jones ary 2026 with Shopify, Walmart, Adyen and Mastercard,
PSE Consulting adds cryptographically signed mandates capping what
an agent can spend. PayPal enrolled millions of existing
K scam-detection service Ask Silver recent- merchants for AI-surface acceptance automatically, using
ly found fraudulent websites impersonat- platform membership as a proxy for legitimacy. Most ma-
ing established British retailers appearing in jor protocols address the buyer's trust problem. The seller's
U ChatGPT recommended shopping results. The trust problem has received far less attention.
incident exposed a structural gap in the industry's agentic
commerce architecture: the payment industry is investing The merchant verification gap
heavily in verifying AI agents as trusted buyers, but almost Visa's Agentic Directory is the industry's closest approach
no equivalent mechanism exists to verify merchants as to a merchant-side trust mechanism. It includes merchants
trusted sellers. The question of who vets the merchant at that Visa has verified as legitimate participants in agentic
the point of AI recommendation is unanswered, and the commerce, and membership determines whether Visa-
payments ecosystem has strong incentives to solve this infrastructure agents will transact with a merchant at all.
problem before it significantly impacts consumer trust in Agent Score, Visa's companion readiness diagnostic, eval-
the emerging agentic channel. uates whether a merchant's site can support agent-driven

The new fraud vector checkout. However, readiness diagnostics of this kind
identify whether a site can transact with agents, not neces-
Ask Silver gave ChatGPT a simple question: recommend sarily whether the merchant is who it claims to be.
popular bags from Russell and Bromley, the British foot-
wear and accessories retailer. The AI responded with The platform-as-gatekeeper model used by Google, Ope-
product details and prices. Several sources it cited were nAI and PayPal offers the most practical near-term miti-
fraudulent websites impersonating the brand. Shoppers gation. Merchants on Shopify or Etsy carry an implicit
who followed the links lost money and had their payment endorsement from those platforms' existing onboarding
details exposed. The scam exploits a specific vulnerabil- rigor. The fraudulent sites in the Ask Silver investigation
ity: Russell and Bromley went into administration in Janu- had no additional platform onboarding. They needed only
ary 2026 and was absorbed by Next, leaving no standalone to appear in a language model's web index.
official site against which a consumer, or an AI, can verify.
Fraudsters filled the gap. The cost of doing nothing
Over the past 20 years marketplaces have built enterprise
Security firm Huntress confirmed in March 2026 that this value by solving precisely this problem. Amazon, eBay
attack method is spreading deliberately. Scammers seed and Airbnb spend heavily every year to verify that their
the internet with fake pages designed specifically so that sellers are who they claim to be, checking identity, busi-
AI tools will cite them as legitimate results. Visa's Payment ness registration and payment flows at onboarding and
Ecosystem Risk and Control unit tracked a more than 450 monitoring behavior thereafter. That investment is not a
percent increase in dark web posts discussing AI agent cost center, it is the foundation of the trust that underpins
tools in the six months to late 2025, and a 25 percent rise their valuations. A buyer transacts with confidence be-
in malicious bot-initiated transactions globally. The threat cause the platform stands behind the seller as merchant
has moved from theoretical to measurable. of record.

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