AI Giants Eye Payments Playbook to Build Industry Auditing Standards

Leading AI developers, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are in talks to establish an industry standards body dedicated to the auditing and testing of AI models. The move signals a shift toward formalizing safety and performance metrics as autonomous agents begin to handle increasingly sensitive tasks.

Since July, representatives from the three companies have held regular working-group discussions to determine how to create a unified framework for AI auditing. This effort seeks to replace fragmented internal safety checks with a centralized, industry-led approach to testing. The goal is to establish concrete technical requirements and accredited third-party auditing processes that can be applied across different model architectures.

The Payments Blueprint

The push for AI standards draws direct inspiration from the payments industry, which has a long history of creating interoperable technical specifications. Organizations such as EMVCo and the FIDO Alliance have successfully standardized how different financial systems communicate, ensuring security and trust across global networks.

These payments bodies are already applying their expertise to the AI era. On September 1, 2026, EMVCo released a draft "EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications" designed to enable secure, interoperable card-based payments executed by AI agents. Similarly, the FIDO Alliance announced the formation of an Agentic Authentication Technical Working Group on April 28, 2026, to develop specifications for secure user delegation to AI agents.

Why Interoperability Matters

Establishing AI standards is significantly more complex than traditional software versioning because it requires consensus on failure thresholds, testing environments, and specific safety metrics. Without a shared playbook, the industry risks extreme fragmentation, where different AI providers operate under conflicting safety definitions, potentially undermining public trust in autonomous systems.

By adopting a model similar to the payments sector, AI companies can move toward a system of certification. This would allow third-party auditors to verify that a model meets a specific, industry-agreed safety benchmark before it is deployed for commercial use. FIDO's Payments Technical Working Group is already demonstrating this synthesis by incorporating Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Mastercard's Verifiable Intent framework into its current specifications.

The Path Forward

While the discussions between Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic mark a significant step, the industry has yet to agree on the exact governance structure of a potential standards body. Observers will be watching to see if these companies can reconcile their competitive interests to create a truly open set of specifications. The success of this initiative will likely depend on whether the resulting standards are adopted by broader regulatory bodies and if they can evolve quickly enough to keep pace with the rapid deployment of agentic AI.