# Verifiable Intent (VI) vs Agent Audit Trail (AAT)

They sit at the same step and overlap in purpose; the fields above are the basis for choosing.

[9 Account](/category/account/) [Verifiable Intent](/protocols/vi/) · [9 Account](/category/account/) [Agent Audit Trail](/protocols/agent-audit-trail/)

|  | [Verifiable Intent](/protocols/vi/) VI | [Agent Audit Trail](/protocols/agent-audit-trail/) AAT |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lifecycle step | 9 Account: Prove what happened; be judged | 9 Account: Prove what happened; be judged |
| Answers | After an agent completes a purchase on a user's behalf, can the merchant, issuer and consumer all point to the same cryptographic record of what the user actually authorized? | Is there a standard, tamper-evident log format any autonomous AI agent can write its actions to, so a regulator, auditor or victim can later reconstruct exactly what it did and why? |
| Governed by | Mastercard; contributed to the FIDO Alliance Payments TWG (2026-04-28); built on FIDO Alliance, EMVCo, IETF and W3C primitives | IETF individual Internet-Draft; not adopted by any IETF working group, 'not endorsed by the IETF' and has 'no formal standing' in the IETF process (datatracker's own disclaimer) |
| Status (issuer's words) | Draft (v0.1); open-sourced specification and reference implementation | Active Internet-Draft (individual submission), Intended status: Standards Track; not a Working Group document |
| Version | 0.1-draft (2026-02-18) | draft-sharif-agent-audit-trail-08 (2026-10-13) |
| Form / transport | document format | document format |
| Found at | none | none |
| Implementation | prototype | none found |
| Evidence | 4 verified | 3 verified |
| Primary use case | Let agents buy on behalf of a person | Audit what an agent did |
| Last verified | 2026-10-23 (current) | 2026-10-23 (current) |
| Specification | [https://verifiableintent.dev/spec/](https://verifiableintent.dev/spec/) | [https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sharif-agent-audit-trail-08](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sharif-agent-audit-trail-08) |

## When to use which

- Choose Verifiable Intent when your question is “After an agent completes a purchase on a user's behalf, can the merchant, issuer and consumer all point to the same cryptographic record of what the user actually authorized?” and you accept its maturity: status "Draft (v0.1); open-sourced specification and reference implementation", implementation prototype.
- Choose Agent Audit Trail when your question is “Is there a standard, tamper-evident log format any autonomous AI agent can write its actions to, so a regulator, auditor or victim can later reconstruct exactly what it did and why?” and you accept its maturity: status "Active Internet-Draft (individual submission), Intended status: Standards Track; not a Working Group document", implementation none found.

Guidance is derived from the two records (question, status, implementation, prerequisites, pairings), not from opinion. Each record's page carries its numbered references.

## Read the full articles

- [Verifiable Intent](/protocols/vi/): After an agent completes a purchase on a user's behalf, can the merchant, issuer and consumer all point to the same cryptographic record of what the user actually authorized?
- [Agent Audit Trail](/protocols/agent-audit-trail/): Is there a standard, tamper-evident log format any autonomous AI agent can write its actions to, so a regulator, auditor or victim can later reconstruct exactly what it did and why?

Ask the MCP server to compare any two: the compare-protocols prompt, or get on both ids. [Connect](/connect/).

[vi.json](/data/protocols/vi.json) · [agent-audit-trail.json](/data/protocols/agent-audit-trail.json) · [Markdown](/compare/vi-vs-agent-audit-trail/index.md)