Ant International said Thursday that Visa and Mastercard have signed on to collaborate on a new standard for payments made by AI agents, betting that consumers and businesses will increasingly delegate shopping and transactions to software that acts on their behalf.
The companies pointed to McKinsey projections that AI agents will handle $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, according to CNBC. But Jiang-Ming Yang, Ant International’s chief innovation officer, told CNBC that the tendency of AI agents to hallucinate means guardrails matter. “We need to make sure people feel safe,” Yang said, adding in the interview that “trust is the foundation of the AI transformation.”
What the collaboration covers
The effort centers on what Ant described as “know your agent” — building shared standards that tie each agent to a valid entity, assess how that agent behaves, and keep it under monitoring. The goal is to make different payment systems work together rather than forcing agents to register separately across each network.
“If an agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard,” Yang told CNBC, describing the interoperability the partners are aiming for.
Over the past year, Visa, Mastercard and Ant International have each rolled out their own protocols for AI agents to complete payments securely — separate efforts that the new collaboration is meant to bridge.
Mastercard’s chief digital officer, Pablo Fourez, framed the coordination as a prerequisite for scale. “Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” he said, according to the report, which also noted his emphasis on giving merchants and payment processors a consistent way to identify which AI agents they can trust.
Cards versus wallets
The partnership brings together two very different payment worlds. Visa and Mastercard dominate card transactions in developed economies, while many developing markets rely on electronic payment systems known as e-wallets. More than 50 such wallets have partnered with Ant International, which operates the “Alipay+” system.
Those digital wallets have increasingly linked to credit cards and are becoming a more common way to pay than physical cards. CNBC cited payment processing company Worldpay in reporting that digital wallets accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, representing more than $13 trillion in spending.
As that base grows, the partners argue, the technology behind AI-driven spending needs to develop securely.
Ant’s expanding agent footprint
Ant International separated nearly three years ago from Hangzhou-based Ant Group, which runs the Alipay mobile payments app in mainland China.
Alipay said Wednesday that users can set up recurring requests to order from Starbucks through one of its AI features. According to a press release cited by CNBC, users can instruct the app to “buy me a Starbucks iced Americano at 10 a.m. every day,” which will place the order at the designated time before prompting the user to complete payment. The same Alipay AI tool already supports recurring ride-hailing requests through Didi.
The announcements sketch out a landscape in which AI agents move from novelty to infrastructure — and where the payment networks that handle the money want common rules in place before that happens. For now, the collaboration between Ant International, Visa and Mastercard is a standards effort rather than a live product, with the partners focused on identity, behavior and monitoring as the building blocks.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/10/ant-international-visa-mastercard-ai-agent-payment-standard.html
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, tax, or legal advice. Do your own research and consult a licensed professional before making financial decisions.
