Surf Air Mobility Names Ex-Palantir Executive to Lead Palantir-Powered SurfOS

Visa teamed up with Mastercard and Ant International to build common standards for verifying AI purchasing agents, sending its shares up roughly 1.3% to $366.229 at 10.49am ET on Thursday morning. The company's Trusted Agent Protocol gives approved AI agents signed credentials that merchants can recognize, drawing a line between legitimate shopping assistants and hostile bots without forcing retailers or payment companies to rebuild the financial plumbing beneath every transaction. Visa's opportunity is to keep control of the valuable layers of authorization, tokenization and fraud protection even when software makes the buying decision. The stock remains 9.38% below its GF Value estimate of $404.14, leaving a visible valuation gap despite the day's advance. The standards strengthen Visa's position, but the payoff depends on AI agents generating new payment volume instead of merely replacing transactions consumers already make.

Mastercard is expanding into agentic commerce through Agent Connect even as major banks demand tougher safeguards for AI shopping agents, with fraud, scams and data-privacy risks moving into focus. The payments network's merchant tools can combine Anthropic's commerce-agent blueprint with Mastercard's payment intelligence and authorization controls, aiming to let AI shop for consumers while keeping Mastercard at the center of every transaction. Shares rose roughly 0.9% to $564.98 at 10.47am ET on Thursday morning. The opportunity carries sharp edges: shopping bots could drive more payment volume, but misunderstood instructions, disputed purchases and murky liability could also inflate network costs. At $564.98, Mastercard trades 17.49% below its GF Value of $684.73.

Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp raised the prospect that massive legal claims could eventually force governments to protect or even take ownership stakes in frontier AI laboratories, pushing legal liability into the debate over frontier AI listings. Shares of the defense and enterprise-AI software company slipped about 0.3% to $191.18 at 10.36am ET on Thursday morning. Palantir's own quarterly filing acknowledges that failures involving generative or agentic AI could trigger liability, regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage. The company can still position itself as the controlled deployment layer rather than a creator of frontier models, but that advantage must be proven through enforceable authorization limits, visible audit trails and contracts that contain customer risk. At $191.18, the stock trades 5.8% above its GF Value estimate of $180.69, suggesting investors already expect Palantir's governance edge to translate into durable growth.