Experian has announced that cybersecurity and edge computing firm Akamai Technologies has joined its Agent Trust partner ecosystem.
The partnership centres on Experian’s Agent Trust framework, which is designed to verify the identity of AI agents, the humans who authorise them, and the intent behind their actions. As AI agents increasingly operate autonomously — searching, deciding, and transacting without direct human input at each step — businesses face growing exposure to fraud, misrepresentation, and unauthorised transactions. The Agent Trust framework seeks to address this by issuing tokens that validate identity, consent, delegated authority, and transaction risk in real time.
Akamai’s role within the ecosystem will be to add an independent security layer at the network edge. Its capabilities will evaluate both human and agent-driven traffic in real time, validating agent identity, correlating it with behavioural signals and user context, and assessing intent. This is intended to ensure that only verified agents and users can access and transact with merchant systems. Skyfire, the third partner, supports emerging payment innovation through tokenised payment credentials, enabling what the parties describe as secure and seamless agent-driven commerce experiences.
All three companies are active members of the KYAPay initiative, an extension of the Know Your Agent protocol, which aims to standardise the way AI agents declare their intent and transact. The protocol provides AI agent developers with a consistent method to identify themselves, the platforms they operate on, and the users they represent, while giving businesses a scalable framework to authenticate those agents.
Experian is a global data and technology company specialising in identity verification, fraud prevention, and credit analytics. Its Agent Trust services are designed to be platform-agnostic and compatible with existing commerce and payment systems, supported by an Agent Registry that maintains dynamic trust scores for human-bonded AI agents. The company says these capabilities build on its existing fraud prevention work, which it says helps clients avoid an estimated $15bn to $19bn in fraud losses annually.
The partnership will see Experian’s identity and fraud prevention services combined with Akamai’s edge security capabilities to create what the companies describe as a layered trust stack. This includes a human-to-agent binding mechanism that links verified consumers, their devices, and the AI agents acting on their behalf, creating what they call a continuous, auditable record of user identity and agent behaviour over time.
Experian chief innovation officer Kathleen Peters said, “Trust, security, and performance must scale alongside the growing role of AI agents in digital commerce. Agentic commerce will not scale without trust. By adding Akamai to our partner ecosystem, we are strengthening the infrastructure to verify agents, the humans behind them, and their intent, enabling fast, secure, and accountable transactions. This reflects strong momentum across our ecosystem as we bring together leaders in identity, payments, and cybersecurity to shape the future of digital commerce.”
Akamai chief technology officer, security strategy, Patrick Sullivan said, “Agent-driven commerce introduces a new set of security expectations for businesses and consumers. Our work with Experian brings together identity intelligence and edge security so organizations can confidently interact with AI agents while maintaining performance and trust across every touchpoint.”
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