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Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets cardholders give an AI agent a virtual card to buy things online without checking in before each purchase, with limits on spending, retailers, or required approval before checkout. Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed, while Meta's Muse can search for products and navigate checkout but presents the purchase for the user's final approval. Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, called it "a land grab for infrastructure standards," saying that if card companies set the standards for agentic commerce they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come. Consumer appetite lags the infrastructure push: just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI assistant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide, and more than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf. Mastercard has developed a digital paper trail called Verifiable Intent to record who authorized the agent to shop and what it was authorized to buy, but when asked who would be responsible if an agent made an incorrect, fraudulent, or unauthorized purchase, Mastercard pointed back to Verifiable Intent and did not specify who would ultimately be responsible if an agent bought something outside those instructions.

Alchemy has turned its agent-payment framework into a live developer product called AgentCard, giving AI software agents single-use Mastercard credentials tied to a customer's existing account rather than permanent access to a payment card. Developers can set spending caps, limit eligible merchants and restrict transactions geographically, while users keep their existing rewards and credit arrangements. Alchemy says the service is already available, letting autonomous agents buy goods anywhere Mastercard is accepted online. Mastercard shares were nearly flat at $566.285 Friday morning, and the chart puts the stock 17.09% below a GF Value estimate of $683. Neither company has disclosed pricing, transaction volumes or committed customers yet.