Mastercard Adds Fraud Detection Layer to Agent Pay AI Payments Platform

The card network has rolled out additional trust and intelligence capabilities for Agent Pay, its AI-driven payments initiative. The new services merge identity verification, intent analysis, behavioral patterns, and fraud detection to enable financial institutions and retailers to make better authorization choices while cutting down on unnecessary hurdles for shoppers.

These capabilities form the intelligence foundation of the Agent Pay Trust Framework. They provide a probability score showing how likely it is that an AI agent started a given transaction. The system also delivers signals addressing whether the activity appears unusual or warrants extra scrutiny.

AI agents will make commerce more intuitive, efficient and personal — but only if people and businesses can trust the systems acting on their behalf, Ann Johnson, executive vice president of security solutions at Mastercard, said in the release.

She added that by incorporating agentic intelligence and risk insights into each transaction, the network aims to give people the assurance to approve payments regardless of how they choose to transact.

Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay in April 2025 as a program designed to enable agentic commerce for both consumers and businesses. The platform allows AI agents to gather information about what a customer wants, identify appropriate products, locate where those items are available, and — depending on the merchant's infrastructure — guide the consumer into the retailer's digital environment to finalize the purchase using a stored card.

The company has also built agentic tokens and standards for agent-initiated transactions. It is collaborating with merchants on those standards while ensuring consumers retain decision-making authority, according to Chiro Aikat, U.S. co-president at Mastercard.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence indicates significant consumer willingness to embrace AI-powered shopping experiences. The Global Digital Shopping Index: The AI-Powered Shopper Has Arrived report found that 56% of consumers would allow AI shopping agents to compare products on their behalf.

Additionally, 35% of consumers said they would permit these agents to access their saved payment methods, signaling growing comfort with delegating both product discovery and payment authorization to automated systems.