Visa, Mastercard and Ant International Are Building a Passport for AI Agents That Spend Your Money

Three of the world’s largest payment companies are teaming up to decide how to trust software that spends your money. Ant International, Visa and Mastercard announced on Thursday that they will jointly develop common standards for identifying, verifying and monitoring AI agents involved in payments — an interoperable “Know Your Agent” framework that could shape how autonomous commerce works for years.

By Keisha Williams | September 10, 2026

The partnership, reported by CNBC, is a straightforward admission that the payments industry sees AI agents — software programs that can search for products, place orders and pay on a person’s behalf — as the next major shift in commerce. Ant International cited McKinsey projections that AI agents could handle between 3 trillion and 5 trillion USD of global consumer commerce by 2030. That is a huge number, and nobody wants that traffic running on systems where the payer cannot be identified.

The Hook: One ID Card for AI Shoppers

The core idea is interoperability. Under the planned framework, merchants and payment providers would have consistent methods for linking an AI agent to a valid entity, evaluating its behavior and monitoring its activity. Crucially, an agent that registers with one participating payment provider would not need to repeat the process with the others.

“If an agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard,” said Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer at Ant International, in an interview with CNBC. Think of it like a passport for software: one verification that works at every border, instead of a separate visa for each country.

Yang argued that safeguards are essential because AI systems can produce incorrect information or take actions users did not intend. “Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation,” he said. Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard, added that “interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale.”

The Evidence: Each Company Has Been Building Its Own Rails

The collaboration formalizes work that has been underway for months. Mastercard launched Agent Connect on Wednesday, a system that gives merchants a single integration for product discovery, cart creation and customer-approved payments across AI shopping platforms. It works alongside Mastercard Agent Pay, which records customer authority through tokenized permissions — essentially a digital record of what an AI system is allowed to buy.

Visa introduced Intelligent Commerce Connect in April, bundling payment initiation, tokenization, authentication and spending controls into infrastructure designed for AI agents. In June, Visa expanded the effort with new AI and stablecoin capabilities, including a partnership with OpenAI to support payments inside agentic commerce experiences. Visa’s stablecoin settlement activity had reached a 7 billion USD annualized run rate at the time.

Mastercard, for its part, unveiled its Agent Pay for Machines network in June with backing from more than 30 payment, blockchain and technology companies — including Ripple, Coinbase, Stripe, Adyen and the Solana Foundation. The network handles transactions initiated by autonomous software, including high-volume, low-value machine-to-machine payments, and can settle through conventional rails or stablecoins.

• 3-5 trillion USD — McKinsey’s projection for AI-agent-handled consumer commerce by 2030
• 50+ digital wallets — partners reachable through Ant’s Alipay+ cross-border platform
• 13 trillion USD+ — total 2025 spending through digital wallets, per Worldpay data cited by the companies
• 56 percent — digital wallets’ share of global e-commerce transaction value in 2025

The Core Conflict: Convenience Versus Control

Why does this matter to anyone outside a payments conference? Because agentic commerce changes who is actually clicking “buy.” When an AI agent makes the purchase, the person it represents may never see the merchant’s checkout page. That creates a trust problem in both directions: merchants need to know the agent is legitimate, and consumers need proof the agent stayed within its instructions.

Blockchain technology sits awkwardly in the middle. Stablecoins have emerged as one of the infrastructure options for machine-led transactions — Visa and Artemis argued in July that stablecoins suit low-value machine-to-machine payments, while traditional cards keep handling consumer purchases. Crypto exchange Wirex joined Visa’s agentic testing program in June to trial AI agents making stablecoin payments for software subscriptions, marketing spending and procurement.

Ant International brings its own scale. Through Alipay+, its cross-border payment platform, more than 50 electronic wallets are connected — widely used in markets where consumers rely on mobile payments instead of plastic. Alipay has already begun letting users schedule recurring Starbucks orders and ride-hailing requests through its AI tools, offering an early live preview of what agentic payments look like in practice.

Market Implications: Standards Winners and Crypto’s Seat at the Table

For investors, the announcement is less about any single token and more about plumbing. When the world’s dominant card networks and Asia’s largest wallet platform agree to build shared identity standards, they are effectively writing the rulebook for autonomous payments. Companies whose infrastructure gets embedded in those standards — including crypto-native firms already in the Agent Pay and Visa programs — gain a durable position.

It also signals how seriously the industry takes the risk side. A framework for verifying agents implies future rules about which agents can transact at all, and records of what they were authorized to do. That audit trail — tokenized permissions, behavior monitoring, cross-provider identity — is conceptually similar to what blockchain projects have long promised for programmable payments, now being built by the incumbents.

The Verdict

The Know Your Agent collaboration is an early-stage announcement, and standards efforts can take years to bear fruit. But the direction is unmistakable: payments are preparing for a world where software spends money on your behalf, and the industry wants that world to have ID checks. For crypto investors, the relevant detail is that stablecoins and blockchain settlement keep appearing in these blueprints — not as the headline, but as working infrastructure inside the machines.

The cryptocurrency market remains highly volatile. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Cryptocurrency markets are volatile; always do your own research before investing.