Akamai Launches ‘Know Your Agent’ Security Framework with Visa and Experian for AI-Driven Commerce

Akamai announced a unified security framework for its Bot & Agent Control product on June 15, connecting AI agent identity verification, behavioral trust scoring, and edge enforcement into a single real-time decisioning layer. The framework addresses a foundational problem for agent-driven commerce: distinguishing legitimate AI agents acting on behalf of users from bots, scrapers, and malicious automated traffic.

Six Pillars, Three Major Partners

The framework is built around six integrated pillars, delivered through a partner ecosystem that includes Visa, Experian, and Skyfire.

The centerpiece is a “Know Your Agent” (KYA) protocol, developed with Skyfire and Experian, that standardizes how agents declare identity, origin, and intent. KYA links each agent to the platform it operates on and the specific human user it represents. The goal, according to Akamai’s announcement, is ensuring that an agent is both legitimate and verified as acting on behalf of an authorized individual before it can process transactions.

Visa’s contribution operates at the payment layer. “Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol provides the identity layer that defines how agents are authenticated, authorized, and trusted at the transaction level,” said Rubail Birwadker, SVP and Head of Growth Products and Partnerships at Visa, in the announcement.

Experian brings risk assessment into the chain. “With the Experian Agent Trust framework, we are helping businesses bring more transparency and accountability to AI-driven interactions by verifying identities, assessing risk, and strengthening confidence in every transaction,” said Kathleen Peters, Experian’s Chief Innovation Officer.

Skyfire handles the payment rails. “Skyfire provides that foundation, enabling agents to authenticate, operate within policy, and access global payment rails,” said CEO Amir Sarhangi. “With Akamai, we’re bringing that trust layer to the edge.”

The Problem Being Solved

Enterprise security teams currently lack a standardized way to handle AI agent traffic. A shopping agent placing an order on behalf of a user looks identical to a scraper or credential-stuffing bot at the network level. Both send automated HTTP requests. Both bypass traditional browser-based verification.

Akamai’s framework attempts to solve this by creating a verification chain from human authorization through agent identity to transaction-level trust, all enforced at the edge before traffic reaches origin servers. Organizations using the framework can set differentiated policies for verified agents, unverified bots, and human users.

The Commerce Layer

The Visa integration is particularly significant for agentic commerce. Today, AI agents that attempt to purchase products or book services on behalf of users operate in a gray area: they lack formal identity credentials, can’t authenticate to payment systems the way human users do, and create fraud-detection headaches for merchants. The Trusted Agent Protocol aims to establish payment-level standards for agent authorization and permissioning.

If these standards gain adoption, they would create the infrastructure layer that agentic commerce has lacked: a way for merchants to accept transactions from AI agents with the same confidence they apply to human customers, complete with identity verification, risk scoring, and fraud controls calibrated for automated traffic patterns.