Alipay plans to launch an artificial intelligence wallet agent designed to help users manage every AI payment transaction, Alipay said at the 2026 Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai, as it moves its AI payment service from enabling agents to pay towards “trusted payment”.
Alipay also added AI recurring-purchase, snap-up and booking scenarios to its AI Pay service, and three “AI Collect” capabilities for merchants - Vibe Pay, Skill Pay and Machine Pay. AI Pay runs on APASS, Ant Group’s in-house commercial trust infrastructure, which applies a Know-Your-Agent approach to build trust across an agent’s identity, intent, authorisation and behaviour.
Alipay said the number of purchases made by agents on users’ behalf had grown sevenfold over the past five months, while users’ average monthly payments had tripled.
PAYMENTS MOVE BEYOND HUMAN INTERFACES
Alipay said payment had traditionally been the final checkout step of a transaction but now needs to run through an agent’s identity, intent, authorisation, execution and accountability. In its example, when a user asks the Qwen assistant to order a coffee, Qwen decides what to find and order, while the wallet agent checks that the order is what the user wanted, that the process complies with the user’s authorisation and how much should be paid, executing the final payment only once the transaction is completed and the result confirmed.
Separately, Ant International, Mastercard and Visa said on 9 September that they had begun work on a Know-Your-Agent interoperability framework for agentic payments.
WHY IT MATTERS
“AI payment is not the last step; it has become the trusted commitment engine for agentic commerce,” said Han Xinyi, chief executive of Ant Group.