Both card networks shipped agentic commerce frameworks in the same quarter. Visa's Intelligent Commerce spans over 100 partners. Mastercard's Agent Pay completed Australia's first authenticated agent transaction in January. The protocol infrastructure is moving.
The liability infrastructure is standing still. Visa's Ramachandran has said openly that agent-initiated disputes remain unresolved. Traditional chargebacks involved four parties. Agents introduce a fifth, and nobody has published rules for how responsibility flows across that longer chain.
Then Citrini Research published a thought experiment about agents routing around interchange fees, and billions briefly evaporated from both networks' market caps. The scenario was speculative. The sell-off was real. What rattled investors wasn't the specific prediction so much as the sudden visibility of a gap: the payments layer is building fast on top of questions it cannot yet answer about who pays when an agent gets it wrong.