Ant International Expands AI Payment Protocol With Visa, Mastercard
Ant International said it is accelerating the global rollout of its Agentic Mobile Protocol, a technical standard designed to let artificial intelligence agents complete mobile payments on behalf of consumers, as more digital wallets and payment acquirers begin adopting the framework.
The Shanghai- and Singapore-based fintech company, a spinoff of China’s Ant Group, said the protocol, known as AMP, is being deployed by an expanding roster of wallet providers and merchant acquirers around the world. The company also announced it has begun working with Mastercard and Visa on what it calls a Know Your Agent, or KYA, interoperability framework, intended to establish common standards for verifying and authenticating AI agents that initiate transactions across different payment networks.
According to the announcement, the push reflects a broader industry shift toward what has been described as “agentic commerce,” in which software agents acting for consumers can search, negotiate and pay for goods and services with limited human input at each step. Ant International framed the KYA collaboration as an early but necessary step to ensure that as agentic payments scale, the industry maintains consistent identity verification and fraud-prevention standards regardless of which wallet, network or acquirer processes a transaction.
The company did not disclose specific transaction volumes, revenue figures or a timeline for full global deployment of AMP, but it characterized adoption among wallets and acquirers as happening at a faster pace than initially anticipated. Ant International positioned the protocol as a foundational layer meant to work across borders and platforms rather than as a proprietary system limited to its own payment products.
The move comes as major card networks and technology companies race to define standards for a payments landscape increasingly shaped by generative AI tools capable of autonomous decision-making. Visa and Mastercard have both signaled interest in recent years in building infrastructure that supports AI-driven purchasing, including tokenization systems and agent-specific credentials meant to distinguish machine-initiated transactions from those made directly by consumers. Analysts covering the payments sector have noted that without shared verification standards, banks and merchants risk inconsistent fraud controls and disputed liability when an AI agent, rather than a person, authorizes a purchase.
Industry observers say the emergence of frameworks like KYA mirrors the earlier development of Know Your Customer rules that banks adopted to verify human account holders and prevent financial crime. Extending a similar concept to software agents introduces new questions, including how to confirm an agent is acting within the bounds set by its human principal, how liability is assigned if an agent makes an unauthorized purchase, and how regulators in different jurisdictions might eventually require disclosure when a transaction is machine-initiated. Payment executives have generally argued that early coordination among major networks reduces the risk of fragmented, incompatible systems emerging as adoption accelerates.
Ant International has positioned itself as a cross-border payments and digital technology provider serving merchants, financial institutions and consumers across Asia, Europe and beyond, building on infrastructure originally developed within Ant Group’s broader digital wallet ecosystem. The company’s push into agentic protocols follows a wider pattern among fintech firms seeking to adapt existing mobile payment rails for a generation of AI shopping assistants and autonomous checkout tools now being tested by retailers and technology platforms.
The company said further details on participating wallet and acquirer partners, as well as the scope of the KYA framework, are expected to be shared as the collaboration with Mastercard and Visa progresses.
More information on the announcement is available via Business Wire.
