Experian has launched Agent Trust, a framework linking verified consumer identities to AI agents to secure autonomous transactions.
The system aims to address a foundational challenge in agentic transactions: how businesses can confirm that an AI-initiated action is authorised by a real, verified individual.
At the core of the framework is a 'Know Your Agent' (KYA) approach, which extends existing identity verification practices into the context of AI-driven interactions. Rather than verifying only the human user at the point of onboarding, Agent Trust creates a persistent, auditable connection between a verified consumer, their device, and the AI agent acting on their behalf, a mechanism Experian refers to as Human-to-Agent Binding.
How the trust stack works
According to the official press release, the framework operates as part of a broader ecosystem involving Visa, Cloudflare, and Skyfire. Each participant addresses a distinct layer of the trust infrastructure.
Experian's Human-to-Agent Binding issues a real-time Agent Trust Token that validates identity and assesses transaction fraud risk. An accompanying Agent Registry maintains dynamic trust scores for AI agents based on behavioural signals over time. In addition, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol enables merchants to verify an agent's legitimacy and its authorisation to act on a consumer's behalf through Visa's network, with Visa Intelligent Commerce supporting the underlying payment layer via network tokenisation.
Cloudflare enforces the trust layer at the network edge. The company currently handles traffic for approximately 20% of the internet and provides infrastructure for building and securing AI agents at scale. Moreover, Skyfire contributes an open, standardised protocol (KYAPay) for packaging and exchanging agent-related information across platforms, supporting interoperability with existing identity and payment systems.
The combined architecture is designed to be platform-agnostic, allowing it to work alongside existing payment frameworks rather than replacing them.
Industry context and implications
The launch comes as agentic AI moves closer to mainstream deployment. This shift introduces compliance and fraud risks that current verification frameworks were not designed to handle, since those systems assume a human is present at each step of a transaction.
Experian's existing verification services are reported to help clients avoid an estimated USD 15–19 billion in fraud losses annually, and the company is positioning Agent Trust as a direct extension of that role into the agentic context.
As AI agents become capable of initiating purchases without direct human input at each step, the ability to trace an action back to an authorised individual becomes a commercial and regulatory necessity. The KYA framework mirrors the logic of KYC requirements already embedded in financial services compliance, applying that same principle to the layer between humans and the systems acting on their behalf.
The Agent Trust framework is currently in development, with no commercial availability date disclosed.
