Agents can pay now. Who checks the agent?

On November 13 OpenAI launched ChatGPT Wallet, built with American Express, Mastercard and Visa. OpenAI's agents can now check out for a user: the agent never sees the card number, it gets a payment token, and the user approves each purchase (US Pro users first; pre-approved spending limits are planned). It joins the card networks' own agent programs (Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Intelligent Commerce) and x402, which lets any HTTP endpoint charge an agent per call in stablecoins. All of them answer one question well: can this agent pay? Tokens, approvals and limits make sure money moves only when the user allows it. Some go a step further and answer who is this agent?: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, for example, lets a merchant recognise a registered agent. None of them answers a third question: how does this agent behave? Should I trust what it tells me before I approve the payment? And once pre-approved limits arrive, there will be no tap on every purchase. Two different checks Payment authorization is about the rail. Is the token valid, is the limit respected, did the user approve? The networks and wallets solve this. Agent behaviour is about the agent. Does it say "I could not complete the task" when it failed, or does it report success anyway? If a seller pays it a commission, does it still pick the cheaper option for the user? Does it follow the user's instruction when a web page tells it to do something else? A perfect payment rail will happily move money for an agent that made a bad choice. What "checking the agent" can look like Fixed tasks with known answers. The agent gets the same tasks every time, and the score comes from rules, not from another model's opinion. An AI judge can be persuaded; a rule cannot. Paid steering on purpose. Some tasks include a hidden incentive to recommend the worse option. The score shows whether the agent tells the user. Honest failure. Some tasks are impossible. The right answer is "I can't", and the score rewards that. A result others can verify. The outcome is public and linkable, so a merchant or a user can see it without re-running anything. The good news from our own runs: frontier agents do well. On our hardest honesty exam the top models scored 100%. The point is not that agents are bad. The point is that "trust me" is not a check, and the agent you connect next month may be a different one. Where this goes Banks check the customer before they move money (KYC). "Know your agent" (KYA) is the same idea for agents. Expect merchants to ask for some proof of agent behaviour, the way APIs ask for keys today. Sources: CNBC on ChatGPT Wallet, OpenAI announcement. Disclosure: I build Pasportoo, which runs exams like these over MCP inside Claude or ChatGPT and issues the result as a verifiable Agent Passport: https://pasportoo.com?utm_source=devto