Ant International announced on Thursday that it has formed a collaboration with Visa and Mastercard to create a common standard for payments routed through AI agents. The initiative is framed around establishing verification protocols that tie each AI agent to a valid entity and systems to track their activities and behavior over time.
The partners said the project is intended to provide a shared technical and operational foundation for transactions initiated or managed by software agents acting on behalf of consumers or businesses. According to the companies, that foundation will include mechanisms to confirm an agent's identity and to monitor how it conducts payment activity.
In discussing the rationale for the effort, the companies referenced projections from McKinsey that estimate AI agents could handle between $3 trillion and $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030. Ant International described the agreement as consistent with expectations that both consumers and businesses will increasingly rely on AI agents to initiate or complete payment transactions.
The announcement does not provide implementation timelines, technical specifications, or details about governance and enforcement of the proposed standards. Instead, the statement focuses on the goals of linking agents to valid entities and implementing ongoing behavioral monitoring as core components of the standards work.
For payments and financial-technology participants, the stated objective is to create interoperable approaches that could be applied across networks and service providers. The parties framed the effort as pre-competitive collaboration aimed at laying down a baseline of verification and monitoring capabilities for AI-enabled commerce.
While the companies provided the broad aims of the partnership, they did not disclose specifics about how the standards will be developed, which organizations will lead particular workstreams, or how adoption across the industry will be encouraged. The announcement also did not include details on any commercial arrangements among the three firms.
Stakeholders in payments processing, merchant services, and platforms that integrate AI agents are likely to follow future disclosures from the partners to assess how the standards might shape integration, compliance, and operational requirements for agent-driven transactions.
Summary of the announcement
- Ant International, Visa and Mastercard will work together to build standards for payments processed by AI agents.
- The collaboration will focus on verifying each AI agent by linking it to a valid entity and on monitoring agent behavior.
- The companies cited McKinsey projections estimating that AI agents could process $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030.