In these initiatives, the group will leverage its track record of delivering standards as well as its work to replace passwords with passkeys and advance digital credentials, the FIDO Alliance said in a Tuesday (April 28) press release.
One initiative is the FIDO Alliance’s formation of an Agentic Authentication Technical Working Group that will focus on how users can delegate actions to AI agents securely, privately and with strong, phishing-resistant authentication.
In the FIDO Alliance’s other new initiative, its Payments Technical Working Group will work on developing specifications for agent-initiated commerce. This effort will draw from two contributions: Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent framework. The working group will review and further develop these contributions.
Google said in a Tuesday blog post that it donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance to further scale the technology and promote industry-wide innovation. The company highlighted the FIDO Alliance’s renown as a creator of open standards.
“Transitioning ownership to the FIDO Alliance ensures AP2 remains platform-agnostic and community-led, while accelerating adoption of secure agentic payments,” Stavan Parikh, vice president and general manager, payments at Google, said in the post.
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Google introduced AP2 in September, saying the protocol was designed to “securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms.”
Mastercard announced Verifiable Intent in March, describing it as an open-source, standards-based framework designed for agentic commerce.
Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, said in a Tuesday post on LinkedIn that Mastercard and collaborators like Google are contributing this framework to the FIDO Alliance’s new standards work to “establish open, interoperable foundations so agent-driven commerce can scale with trust, accountability and privacy built in from the start — not bolted on later.”
Speaking of the two newly announced initiatives, FIDO Alliance Executive Director and CEO Andrew Shikiar said in the Tuesday press release that people are already using AI agents to get things done online.
“To scale this safely, people need to trust that these actions are secure, authorized and truly reflect their intent,” Shikiar said. “These initiatives bring the industry together to establish a trusted foundation for agent-driven interactions across authentication and commerce.”
