Thursday brought news from Ant International that Visa and Mastercard have joined forces to help establish a common standard for payments executed by AI agents. The company believes these digital representatives will take on an ever larger portion of both consumer and business spending.
McKinsey’s projections place AI agents on track to manage $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, and those figures were cited by the companies. However, Jiang-Ming Yang, chief innovation officer of Ant International, told CNBC that AI agents’ potential for hallucination meant “we need to make sure people feel safe.”
“Trust is the foundation of the AI transformation,” Yang told CNBC in an interview.
The Know-Your-Agent Framework
The new collaboration focuses on how payment companies can “know your agent,” Ant said in the announcement. That includes building common standards that link each agent to a valid entity, assess each agent’s behavior and monitor them.
The aim is to raise how well the separate systems work together so that users can move between them without trouble. An AI agent signed up with one payment network should be able to operate across all of them.
“If [an] agent registers with Ant, they don’t need to register again with Visa, Mastercard,” Yang said.
Three Separate Protocols
Over the last 12 months, three major payment companies — Visa, Mastercard and Ant International — have each released their own protocols for AI agents to carry out transactions with security.
This new partnership seeks to bring together separate initiatives rather than allow them to drift apart. A shared benchmark would enable merchants and payment processors to identify which AI agents they can rely on, no matter which network the agent originally signed up with.
“Interoperability across Know-Your-Agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale,” said Pablo Fourez, chief digital officer at Mastercard.
Why Digital Wallets Matter Here
In developed economies, Visa and Mastercard hold the lead in transaction volume, yet in many developing economies a different kind of system prevails: electronic payment systems, or e-wallets. Over 50 of these e-wallets have formed partnerships with Ant International, whose services are delivered through an “Alipay Plus” app.
Digital wallets have grown into a more common payment method than physical credit cards, linking to those cards along the way. According to payment processing company Worldpay, they accounted for 56% of global e-commerce value and 33% of point-of-sale value in 2025, for more than $13 trillion in spending.
Now that technology needs to develop securely for AI-driven spending.
What Ant International Actually Does
Hangzhou-based Ant Group, which operates the Alipay mobile payments app in mainland China, parted ways with Ant International almost three years ago.
Wednesday saw Alipay announce a new feature: users can now set up recurring requests to place Starbucks orders through one of its AI tools. The move is part of the company’s broader push into consumer-facing AI products.
Users can tell the app to “buy me a Starbucks iced Americano at 10 a.m. every day,” which will regularly place the order at the designated time, before prompting the user to complete the payment, according to a press release.
The same Alipay AI tool lets users place recurring ride-hailing requests through Didi.
The Hallucination Problem
A shared standard is being pursued in part because of a well-known weakness in AI systems: they sometimes produce information that sounds true but isn’t. When an agent is handling funds, this kind of error becomes especially dangerous.
Yang said the risk means the industry needs to build safety into the system from the start. The “know your agent” approach is meant to verify that an agent is what it claims to be before it is allowed to make a payment.
What the Standard Will Cover
The collaboration will build common standards that cover three areas:
- Linking each agent to a valid entity.
- Assessing each agent’s behavior.
- Monitoring agents over time.
Fourez on Interoperability
Fourez emphasized the requirement for a reliable method that lets sellers and payment processors identify which AI agents they can trust. According to him, shared standards across Know-Your-Agent systems are necessary for agentic commerce to operate on a large scale.
The standard aims to stop a fragmented market where each network operates under its own rules. Consumers might benefit by having an AI agent set up in one app work in another.
A Bet on the Future of Commerce
This collaboration hinges on the expectation that AI agents will eventually be commonplace for consumers purchasing goods. The projection from McKinsey that AI-agent-managed commerce could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030 is a substantial figure, yet both firms are positioning themselves to manage that volume of commerce.
Ant International can draw on an existing digital wallet infrastructure as its foundation. Its deals with over 50 e-wallets put it in touch with payment systems used across developing economies.
The two card networks already hold sway over payments in advanced economies, and they also possess the established systems needed to move money through agents equipped with artificial intelligence.
The statement shows that the payment field now considers AI agents to be an actual piece of its coming direction.
Source: cnbc.com
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