Visa, Mastercard and Ant want one trust layer for AI agents
Two infrastructure bets landed this morning: the payments industry agreed on how to tell a good shopping agent from a bad one, and the US Army bought navigation that doesn't need satellites.
Ant International, Visa and Mastercard said Thursday they will build a common "Know Your Agent" interoperability framework — one identity and behaviour check for AI agents that spend money, recognised across card networks, wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces. The three companies have each shipped their own agent-payment protocol in the past year — Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, Mastercard's Verifiable Intent and Ant's Agentic Mobile Protocol — and this initiative is the glue between them: register an agent once with Ant and it doesn't need registering again with Visa or Mastercard, while each network keeps its own approval and risk rules. The work runs through BuildFin.ai, a platform convened by the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
The commercial logic is a number the companies put in their own release: McKinsey's projection that AI agents will handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. That is why Ant's chief innovation officer Jiang-Ming Yang told CNBC the point is not capability but confidence — agents hallucinate, so "we need to make sure people feel safe." This is also a wallet story as much as a card story: more than 50 e-wallets already connect to Ant's Alipay+ system, and digital wallets carried 56% of global e-commerce value in 2025.
Our take: this is the least glamorous and most load-bearing piece of agentic commerce so far. Every lab is shipping agents that can browse and buy; nothing has answered the question a merchant actually asks — who is this agent, who stands behind it, and can I charge back when it goes wrong? A shared registry answers that in one lookup instead of fifty bilateral deals, and the side that owns the registry quietly sets the rules for who gets to transact. We tracked the Chinese end of this earlier — China's payment industry adopts a 'Know Your Agent' rulebook for AI that spends money — and the ambition now is clearly cross-border.
The US Army has awarded Austin-based Tern an $11.26 million contract for a positioning system that works without GPS, in a vehicle-mounted kit the startup calls "Google Maps for the battlefield." The firm-fixed-price Phase III SBIR award covers an "Independently Derived Positioning System" plus vehicle health and maintenance monitoring, with work in Austin and an estimated completion date of August 2027. The hardware is deliberately mundane: a device plugged into the vehicle's diagnostics port, wired to a tablet that shows the soldier position, navigation and routing.
Tern's pitch is that modern vehicles already emit enough sensor data to compute their own location on the edge, and CEO Shaun Moore says the stack passively listens to that data rather than injecting anything. Co-founder Brett Harrison used it on a 1,300-mile drive from Austin to Laguna Beach without losing position once, while conventional GPS dropped out dozens of times. Because the system is closed and self-contained, it is harder to jam or spoof than a satellite signal — which is the actual reason the Army is buying, given GPS interference is routine over the Middle East and around Ukraine.
What to watch: whether the Know-Your-Agent framework ships as a real cross-network spec or stalls as a memorandum, and whether Tern's Army award converts into a program of record rather than a one-off test.
Would you let an agent spend your money automatically if the network behind it could vouch for the agent — or is that a line you don't cross? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: CNBC · Reuters · Techmeme · TechCrunch (Tern) · EnvZone contract record
