Key Takeaways
- Ant Group's Alipay unveiled AI Wallet and Token Pay, presenting a full-stack agentic payment infrastructure built for AI shopping agents
- The entry of one of China's largest payment networks into agent payments adds a new axis to a race that Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe have led so far
- EC operators should anticipate payment leadership expanding from card networks to wallets and payment platforms, and start reviewing their agent transaction authorization design and support for diverse payment methods
Alipay Makes Its Move Into Agent Payments With AI Wallet and Token Pay
Alipay added AI Wallet and Token Pay for agent shopping, as payment teams face new trust, fraud, and authorization questions.
www.techrepublic.comIn May 2026, Alibaba-affiliated Ant Group introduced two products as Alipay's next-generation AI payment infrastructure: AI Wallet and Token Pay. They are designed around AI agents (shopping agents) that can shop, book services, and complete payments on behalf of consumers. Ant Group describes the offering as a 'full-stack' AI payment solution that connects developers, retail businesses, and consumers.
Until now, the payment infrastructure for Agentic Commerce has been led by Western players such as Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe. That landscape now includes one of China's largest payment networks, with a user base in the range of one billion monthly active users. The competition to standardize agent payments has taken on a decidedly global character.
The Two Roles AI Wallet and Token Pay Play
The most important aspect of this announcement is that Alipay split the payment challenge into two layers: 'user permission' and 'value transfer.' Ant Group CEO Cyril Han Xinyi captured the design philosophy in a single phrase: 'Agents execute payments, while tokens carry value.'
AI Wallet is the consumer-facing control layer. Embedded inside the Alipay app, it lets users monitor, manage, and authorize tasks carried out by AI agents before, during, and after a transaction. Users can set permissions for which merchant an agent may use, up to what amount, and what it may buy, and they can review and analyze their spending afterward. It is a mechanism for keeping a human hand on the reins so that an agent does not run away with unintended purchases.
Token Pay is a B2B payment product for AI model providers. It is designed to handle subscription billing, in-agent token top-ups, and complex micro-transactions. It plays the behind-the-scenes role of supporting the payment flows that occur between agent platforms, model providers, and merchants. Lin Zhu, general manager of Alipay's AI payment business, noted that 'payments are no longer just the final step; they are becoming a capability embedded from the very beginning.'
The example Ant Group gave is easy to grasp. An AI agent running on smart glasses could order, customize, and pay for coffee before the user even enters a cafe. The user avoids checkout friction, but the payment system still needs to know exactly who approved the transaction, what the agent was allowed to do, and when the user can intervene. AI Wallet addresses precisely this authorization problem, while Token Pay handles the value-transfer problem on the back end.
A Track Record of Over 100 Million Users and a Trust Framework
Behind Alipay's push into agent payments is a track record it has already built. In February 2026, Ant Group announced that Alipay AI Pay became the first AI payment product globally to surpass 100 million users, processing more than 120 million transactions during the week of February 5-11. Cumulative transactions have reached 300 million, making it what the company calls the world's first commercially scaled AI-native payment infrastructure. In April, Alipay also launched an AI Pay service enabling OpenClaw-type AI agents to make payments, with identity verification, per-payment user authorization, 24/7 risk controls, and account-protection coverage. Use cases are steadily widening, from in-app agents for traditional retailers like Luckin Coffee to smart glasses such as Rokid's.
Alongside this announcement, Alipay launched what it calls China's first Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol together with partners. It is an effort to create a 'common language' for collaboration between AI platforms and service platforms. Alipay also introduced an intelligent security system for AI payments, intended to provide foundational safeguards for every agent-driven transaction.
The Competitive Picture Against Visa, Mastercard, and Stripe
Alipay's entry adds a new force to the race to standardize agent payments. It is worth laying out the moves of the major Western players here.
Visa announced Visa Intelligent Commerce in May 2025 and built a Trusted Agent Protocol that distinguishes legitimate AI agents from malicious bots. It issues cryptographic credentials to agents, and merchants verify the agent's identity and the scope of user authorization through Visa's verification endpoints. Mastercard, with Agent Pay, introduced two primitives: Agentic Tokens bound to a specific agent identity, and Verifiable Intent, which records the scope of a user's authorization as a cryptographically signed artifact. Stripe rolled out its Agentic Commerce Suite in 2026, providing Shared Payment Tokens, short-lived credentials scoped by merchant, expiry, and maximum amount.
While these Western players compete on standards at the card-network and payment-processing layers, Alipay's strength lies in starting from the wallet itself. Backed by a user base in the range of one billion and the implementation environment of a Chinese market where codeless payments are part of daily life, Alipay can vertically integrate everything from the consumer-facing AI Wallet to Token Pay for merchants and model providers.
What deserves attention is that these frameworks are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As of April 2026, more than 60 companies, including Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, and Coinbase, were aligned on the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), a vendor-neutral authorization format. Most production agent-payment flows in 2026 are expected to touch more than one framework. How Alipay's newly announced Trust Protocol connects to this interoperability trend will be a key thing to watch.
New Checks Payment Teams Will Need
The expansion of agent payments poses new challenges for every business that handles payments. Accenture estimated that more than 30% of online commerce could run through AI agents by 2030, representing nearly $3.1 trillion in transactions. At the same time, its research found that only 12% of consumers are willing to let agents make payment choices today.
Fraud teams are under pressure as well. Accenture's research found that 78% of financial payments leaders expect fraud to increase significantly with agentic payments, while 87% see trust as the biggest adoption barrier. The same research found that 60% lack a dedicated response plan and forensic tools for agent-driven fraud.
These conditions fundamentally change the payment-infrastructure checklist. Agent payments require identity checks, clearly defined spending permissions, real-time anomaly detection, audit trails, and dispute processes that account for actions taken by software on a user's behalf. AI agents can act quickly, but they can also make mistakes quickly. Payment teams cannot treat agent actions like ordinary human checkout behavior.
Implications for EC Operators
Alipay's announcement carries significant meaning for EC operators as well.
Grasp the broadening of payment leadership. The agent-payments conversation has been card-network-centric, but Alipay's entry shows that wallets and payment platforms can also hold the standards. EC operators that do business, or plan to do business, in Asian markets in particular need to factor in support for payment ecosystems that differ by region.
Review your authorization design now. Before AI agents are granted broad spending authority, decide which transactions require human approval, how agent activity is logged, and who is responsible when an automated purchase is disputed. The 'authorize before, during, and after' concept that AI Wallet offers consumers is also a useful reference when thinking about authorization design on the merchant side.
Assume support for multiple frameworks. Because Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Alipay each maintain their own token formats, production agent-payment flows will span multiple frameworks. Using modular solutions and consciously building flexible configurations that avoid over-dependence on any single framework will reduce risk over the long term.
Conclusion
Alipay's launch of AI Wallet and Token Pay makes it clear that the payment infrastructure for agentic commerce is no longer the exclusive domain of Western players. The approach of separating consumer authorization from back-end value transfer, under the design philosophy that 'agents execute payments, while tokens carry value,' gets at the essence of agent payments.
The next things to watch are how Alipay's Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol connects to interoperability frameworks like AP2, and how much influence a wallet-centric model backed by a billion-user base can wield against the card-network-centric models of the West. For EC operators, the era of multipolar payment leadership calls for getting an early start on authorization design and on support for diverse payment methods.
