Identity

Traditional Privileged Access Management was built around a simple premise: human users need elevated access sometimes, so we vault those credentials, require checkout, and log who used what when. It works reasonably well for humans, who operate on human timescales, request access explicitly, and can be held accountable by name. AI agents operate differently. They access dozens of systems in parallel, at machine speed, for tasks that were authorized in general but not pre-approved in each specific instance. The traditional PAM model — vault credentials, check them out, check them back in — doesn’t map cleanly onto an agent that makes 200 API calls in thirty seconds across five different systems. ...

The payments infrastructure problem for agentic AI is real: when an AI agent makes a purchase on your behalf, how does the merchant know it was actually authorized? How does your bank verify the agent followed your instructions? How do you audit what happened afterward? On Thursday, Mastercard announced its answer: Verifiable Intent, an open-source, standards-based framework for agentic commerce. What Verifiable Intent Does Verifiable Intent addresses three things that current payment infrastructure doesn’t handle well for AI agents: ...