Akamai Builds a Trust Layer for the Coming AI Agent Economy

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – June 15, 2026 – The digital landscape is on the cusp of a profound transformation. AI agents—autonomous programs designed to perform tasks, conduct commerce, and manage data on behalf of human users—are moving from theoretical concepts to practical reality. But as they proliferate, they introduce a fundamental trust crisis: How can a business know if an automated request is from a legitimate customer's agent or a sophisticated malicious bot? How can it ensure the agent has the proper authority to act?

Addressing this challenge head-on, cybersecurity and cloud giant Akamai today unveiled its Agentic Security Framework. The ambitious initiative aims to create a unified system for authenticating, managing, and securing the burgeoning AI-driven economy. By integrating identity verification, real-time trust analysis, and security enforcement at the network's edge, Akamai and its ecosystem of partners are building the foundational rails for a world where automated interactions can be trusted at scale.

“AI agents are replacing clicks, acting and handling commerce for us. For that to work, businesses need to recognize not just the agent, but who is behind it and what it’s trying to do,” said Patrick Sullivan, VP, CTO of Security Strategy at Akamai. “We’ve built this so that identity informs visibility, visibility drives trust, and trust powers the decisions that let companies safely grow and monetize these new AI interactions.”

Solving the Agent Identity Crisis

The core of the trust problem lies in accountability. Without a reliable way to tie an AI agent back to a verified human user, the potential for fraud, abuse, and operational disruption is immense. Akamai's framework tackles this through a multi-layered approach centered on the “Know Your Agent” (KYA) protocol, developed in collaboration with partners Skyfire and Experian.

KYA provides a standardized method for an agent to cryptographically declare its identity, its origin platform, and the intent of its actions. This creates a verifiable provenance chain linking the agent to the authorized individual it represents. “AI agents can’t participate in the economy without trusted identity and the ability to transact,” explained Amir Sarhangi, Co-Founder and CEO of Skyfire. “Skyfire provides that foundation — enabling agents to authenticate, operate within policy, and access global payment rails.”

Experian extends this concept with its Agent Trust framework, which issues a real-time “Agent Trust token” to validate identity, user consent, and delegated authority. “AI agents are quickly becoming part of digital commerce, but trust will determine how far and how fast adoption grows,” said Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer at Experian. The collaboration aims to give merchants the confidence needed to process automated transactions safely.

Nowhere is this more critical than in digital payments. To that end, Akamai is working closely with Visa on its Trusted Agent Protocol (TAP). This protocol defines how agents are authenticated and authorized within payment environments, using agent-specific cryptographic signatures to distinguish them from malicious bots. “Without trusted identity and explicit permissioning, AI agents cannot participate in commerce at scale,” stated Rubail Birwadker, SVP, Head of Growth Products and Partnerships at Visa. “Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol provides the identity layer that defines how agents are authenticated, authorized, and trusted at the transaction level so businesses and consumers can transact with confidence.”

The Technical Backbone: Edge Enforcement and Unified Trust

Establishing identity is only the first step. The framework’s power lies in its ability to enforce trust decisions in real-time without compromising performance. This is accomplished through Akamai’s vast distributed edge network, which acts as a global control plane for AI interactions.

By processing security logic at the edge—physically closer to the user and the agent—the system can evaluate the risk and intent of every automated request instantly. This “edge-based enforcement” allows businesses to block malicious activity before it ever reaches their origin servers, preserving backend resources and ensuring a seamless experience for legitimate users and their agents.

To bridge the gap between human users and their AI counterparts, the framework integrates with leading identity providers like Auth0 and Ping Identity. These integrations allow businesses to extend their existing security policies—such as multi-factor authentication and behavioral analysis—to the agents acting on their customers' behalf. This ensures a consistent security posture, whether an action is initiated by a person or their digital proxy.

“AI agents introduce a new trust challenge because session-based trust alone is no longer sufficient,” noted Loren Russon, SVP of Product Management at Ping Identity. “By combining Ping’s runtime identity capabilities with Akamai’s edge enforcement and visibility, enterprises can extend identity and access controls to AI-driven interactions with stronger accountability and oversight.”

This architecture moves security beyond simple binary decisions. Instead of just blocking or allowing traffic, the framework enables “adaptive trust analysis,” evaluating each interaction on a spectrum to determine its intent and value. This nuanced approach helps businesses distinguish between beneficial automation, risky but legitimate agent activity, and outright abuse.

Monetizing the Machines: A New Economy for Content

While much of the focus is on mitigating risk, Akamai’s framework also presents a solution to one of the digital economy's most pressing new challenges: how to handle the voracious appetite of AI models for web content. As large language models and their agentic offshoots scrape websites for data, publishers and content creators face the threat of having their intellectual property consumed without compensation.

The Agentic Security Framework reframes this threat as an opportunity. Through partnerships with companies like TollBit and Skyfire, Akamai enables a new value exchange. Using its ability to identify agentic traffic at the edge, Akamai can redirect AI agents to a dedicated portal where content access rules are enforced. Publishers can then negotiate terms and facilitate tokenized, pay-per-request models for their data.

“AI agents are the new visitors and shoppers of the internet, and websites need a way to transact with them,” said Toshit Panigrahi, Co-Founder and CEO of TollBit. He explained that by using Akamai’s detection capabilities, businesses can direct agents to a specialized destination where they can “enforce their own access rules and turn it into a new revenue stream, making AI traffic a source of value rather than a cost.” This creates a sustainable model where AI developers get licensed access to high-quality data, and publishers are fairly compensated for their content.

By uniting these capabilities, Akamai is providing businesses with a unified dashboard to manage the entire spectrum of their web traffic. Using tools like TrafficPeak and advanced web security analytics, organizations can finally distinguish clearly between human users, beneficial AI agents, and malicious bots. This enhanced visibility provides the data necessary to refine access controls, optimize commercial strategies, and confidently step into the emerging agentic economy.