AI Safety Standards Debate Can Learn from Payments Industry: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI Discuss Industry Audit Body
As three AI giants debate who writes the tests and who enforces them, the payments industry offers a proven playbook for turning broad trust questions into testable technical requirements.
AI Safety Standards Debate Can Learn from Payments Industry: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI Discuss Industry Audit Body
According to a PYMNTS report dated September 14, 2026, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI are in discussions to form an industry body for AI testing and auditing. While the three parties agree that powerful AI models require shared safety standards, they remain divided on key issues: who writes the tests, who carries out the evaluations, and under what conditions a model should be deemed non-compliant.
The payments industry has years of accumulated experience in standards development. In 2018, the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium introduced FIDO2 and WebAuthn, which became universal specifications for passwordless authentication; in 2022, EMVCo published contactless kernel specifications. These organizations are now extending their work into the AI agent space: FIDO launched an initiative in April of this year to develop specifications for agent identity verification and payments, while EMVCo released a draft framework for agent payments in September.
The lesson from payments standards is that they do not broadly certify "payment security." Instead, they write specifications for specific components of payment systems and establish processes to determine whether an implementation meets those standards. For the AI industry, this approach could offer a reference: breaking down broad trust questions into testable technical requirements.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/news/artificial-intelligence/2026/ai-standards-push-can-borrow-from-payments-playbook/
Provenance & status
- Byline
- OceanAlt Editorial
- First published
- 2026-09-15
- Last updated
- 2026-09-15
- Content type
- Newsflash
- Source material
- View original ↗
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