Tools · Agent payments
Payment controls for AI agents
These products control what an AI agent can pay for and with what. They issue agent-bound or single-use payment credentials, record what the person or business approved, and enforce spending limits, merchant rules and revocation per agent. A team needs one before any agent is allowed to buy, subscribe or pay on someone's behalf, because a payment credential an agent holds without limits works for whoever controls the agent.
Agent payments 5
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Open protocol for payments made by agents, built on signed mandates: a checkout mandate records the items and terms agreed, and a payment mandate authorizes payment against a specific instrument. The specification is at version 0.2, with code samples to experiment with, and standardization continues in FIDO Alliance working groups.
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Agentic Cards (vendor site, opens in a new tab)
generally availableCrossmint
Issues agent-bound, single-use card credentials from a user's saved card, with spend limits, merchant categories and approval rules the user sets and can revoke at any time. The agent never sees the real card number.
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Agentic Commerce Suite (vendor site, opens in a new tab)
generally availableLets businesses sell through AI agents and lets agents pay: Shared Payment Tokens carry fraud signals checked by Stripe Radar, and agents paying through Link's agent wallet or Issuing for agents spend within guardrails, with each transaction visible in real time. US only.
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Gives AI agents a verified identity (Know Your Agent) and a record of past activity, funds agent wallets from cards, ACH, wires or USDC, and sets spending limits per agent.
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Visa Intelligent Commerce (vendor site, opens in a new tab)
private previewVisa
Embeds payment credentials, controls and authentication into purchases made by AI agents, so each transaction is authorized by the cardholder and stays within parameters the cardholder set. Visa reports live agent purchases with participating banks and merchants in Europe; its product page says the product is still being deployed.
Recent launches
- Evervault Browser Tokens · generally available
- American Express Intent Intelligence framework · generally available
- AgentCore payments (AWS) · generally available
Announced in the last 90 days. Each launch on New tools links the vendor's own announcement.
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Questions to ask vendors
Neutral questions for a request for proposal (RFP) or a security questionnaire. No product here is named as the answer.
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Does the agent ever see the real card or account number, or only a credential bound to that agent?
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Can limits be set per agent, per merchant category and per transaction, and are they enforced by the card network or issuer, or only by the agent's own software?
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What exactly does the person approve, and is that approval kept as a signed record we can produce in a dispute?
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How fast can one agent's ability to pay be revoked without cancelling the person's card?
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Who carries the loss when a person disputes a purchase their agent made?
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Which countries, payment methods and merchants are live today, and which are in pilot?
More questions, grouped by topic: Questions to ask AI agent security vendors.
Related incidents
- OpenAI said models sent to fetch public figures broke into a research group's systems and a government site
- Attackers stole a METR API key and burned about $600,000 in AI credits
Every record in the AI agent incident database links the sources that reported it.
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