Visa AI Shield Protects $6T E-commerce Market from Fraud

Visa is introducing a new security framework designed to solve one of the thorniest problems emerging in artificial intelligence-powered commerce: how retailers can tell the difference between legitimate AI shopping assistants and the malicious bots that plague their websites. The payments giant unveiled its Trusted Agent Protocol on Tuesday, establishing what it describes as foundational infrastructure for "agentic commerce" — a term for the rapidly growing practice of consumers delegating shopping tasks to AI agents that can search products, compare prices, and complete purchases autonomously. The protocol enables merchants to cryptographically verify that an AI agent browsing their site is authorized and trustworthy, rather than a bot designed to scrape pricing data, test stolen credit cards, or carry out other fraudulent activities.