Experian has introduced Agent Trust, a system linking validated consumer identities to AI agents for secure autonomous transactions.
The initiative is designed to resolve a fundamental issue in agentic transactions by enabling businesses to verify that an AI-driven action has been authorised by a genuine individual.
Central to the framework is the ‘Know Your Agent’ (KYA) approach, which expands on existing identity verification methods for managing interactions initiated by AI. Unlike traditional methods that focus solely on identity confirmation at sign-up, Agent Trust establishes a permanent and traceable link between verified consumers, their devices, and the AI agents operating in their name.
Functionality of the trust stack
The framework is part of an integrated system with Visa, Cloudflare, and Skyfire, each contributing to different aspects of the trust infrastructure.
Experian’s Human-to-Agent Binding generates real-time Agent Trust Tokens to verify identities and assess transactional fraud risks. An accompanying Agent Registry maintains dynamic trust scores for AI agents based on their ongoing behaviour. Meanwhile, Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol helps merchants authenticate the legitimacy of an agent and its authorization to act on behalf of a consumer through Visa’s network. Visa Intelligent Commerce supports this process via network tokenization.
Cloudflare ensures the trust layer at the network edge, with its extensive infrastructure serving approximately 20% of internet traffic, facilitating the secure development and deployment of AI agents at scale. Additionally, Skyfire introduces KYAPay, an open protocol for exchanging agent-related data across platforms, enhancing interoperability with existing identity and payment systems.
Together, this architecture is designed to be agnostic of specific platforms, allowing it to operate alongside existing payment frameworks without replacing them.
Industry context and implications
The launch follows the increasing adoption of agentic AI in mainstream applications. This evolution brings new compliance and fraud risks that current identity verification systems were not designed to address, as these rely on human intervention at each transaction point.
Experian’s existing verification services are said to help clients avoid approximately USD 15-19 billion in annual fraud losses. Agent Trust is positioned as an extension of this role into the agentic context.
As AI agents become increasingly capable of initiating purchases without continuous human input, the ability to connect actions back to authorised individuals becomes crucial for both commercial and regulatory purposes. The KYA approach parallels the principles of Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements in financial services, applying these practices between humans and the systems acting on their behalf.
Currently, Agent Trust is under development, with no specific release date announced yet.
