Know Your Agent

What is Know Your Agent?

Know Your Agent is Mastercard’s rule that an agent must be registered and verified before it can pay with an Agent Pay token.

The Agent Pay product page states it as “Know your agent”: only registered agents can transact, and the credentials are Mastercard network tokens. The April 29, 2025 announcement says trusted agents are registered and verified, and that the cardholder controls what the agent may buy. Later posts describe live authenticated transactions in Australia on January 28, 2026, in South Korea on March 17, 2026, and across Latin America and the Caribbean on March 24, 2026. Those posts say the issuer, acquirer, and merchant could see that an agent was in the flow.

Visa’s parallel control has a different name. Production access to Visa Intelligent Commerce, on the getting-started page read November 12, 2026, requires the Visa Agent Registry and the Trusted Agent Protocol. A merchant who treats the two names as one signup has merged two networks.

Agent Pay for Machines, opened to early access on October 20, 2026, is a budget for an agent paying an API. It uses the same company and a different job from a shopper’s checkout.

The payment table is How do AI shopping agents pay?. The checkout step is agentic checkout. The category is agentic commerce. The check itself is a guardrail around a shopping agent.