Case Study: Visa secures agentic commerce transactions with WorkOS

Visa secures agentic commerce transactions with WorkOS amid 450% surge in AI agent dark web posts

Visa's Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control (PERC) team identified a critical security challenge with the rise of agentic commerce: a 450% increase in dark web posts targeting AI agents. The core problem was that fraud in this new model appeared as clean, legitimate transactions because attackers hijacked the delegated credentials and purchase history that agents held, making the fraudulent activity nearly impossible for traditional systems to detect.

WorkOS provided the security infrastructure to address this by implementing agent identity, scoped delegation, and transaction-level consent. Their solution used OAuth 2.1 for per-agent credentials and fine-grained authorization (FGA) to create a secure, auditable framework. This allowed Visa to build a traceable system to prove what was authorized by whom and when, providing the necessary evidence for future liability frameworks as agentic commerce scales.

Visa