India plans a national registry to vet AI agents on UPI

India’s National Payments Corporation of India is developing a national registry to identify, screen and verify AI agents that make payments on users’ behalf, as part of a proposed Unified Agentic Protocol, Reuters reported on September 10, citing people familiar with the matter.

NPCI operates the country’s retail payment rails, including the Unified Payments Interface, one of the world’s largest retail fast-payment systems by transaction volume. The registry would initially cover agents transacting through UPI, with NPCI expected to begin with relatively small, frequent payments such as grocery purchases. More complex use cases, including conditional purchases or investment-related actions, could follow as the framework matures. The registry could eventually extend beyond UPI to payment cards and bill-payment systems, according to the report.

The protocol builds on UPI Circle, an existing delegated-payments framework that lets a primary account holder authorise another person to transact with spending limits and consent controls, according to ClearingPost, which reported on an earlier version of the plan in July. The new protocol would extend that delegation mechanism to software agents rather than only other people. AI agents transacting under the framework could originate from merchant apps, consumer payment applications, or general-purpose AI assistants.

Liability for incorrect or unauthorised payments made by an agent has not been settled and will need to be addressed through regulation, according to Reuters. The protocol requires approval from the Reserve Bank of India before it can launch.

NPCI’s approach differs from industry-led efforts such as Visa’s Agentic Directory and the framework Ant Group, Mastercard and Visa have separately pursued, in that it is tied to a national payments utility rather than a commercial network. China’s Payment and Clearing Association has issued its own guidelines for AI-agent payments, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft have each built ways to register or identify agents within their own software ecosystems.

If it proceeds, India would be among the first countries to build agent verification directly into national payments infrastructure rather than leaving it to individual platforms.