Mastercard Lets AI Shopping Agents Pay With One-Time Virtual Cards
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Shekoa Koo Chuam, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped and resized)
Image: Contactless payment method logos, including Mastercard and Mastercard PayPass, displayed at a convenience store in Hong Kong. Photo by Shekoa Koo Chuam, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped and resized).
Mastercard has partnered with payments startup Alchemy to let artificial intelligence agents make purchases on a person’s behalf using one-time-use virtual cards, according to reporting by Gizmodo on 17 September 2026. Cardholders authorise an AI agent in advance to spend within set parameters, such as a price range, and the agent can then complete purchases — from ordering food to booking travel — without further manual approval at checkout.
How the Virtual Cards Work
Through Alchemy’s tools, developers can deploy what the companies call an AgentCard within about a minute, giving an AI agent its own dedicated email address, phone number, stablecoin wallet, and single-use Mastercard payment credentials, Gizmodo reported. Mastercard’s chief AI and data officer, Greg Ulrich, said the shift required rewriting the network’s existing anti-fraud logic: “We’ve built a bunch of risk rules over time that were intended to stop a bot from transacting. Now we need to enable the bot to transact, so that requires a change to our risk framework and our risk rules.”
Part of a Broader Push
The Alchemy deal builds on Mastercard’s existing Agent Pay framework, which the company introduced in 2025 to let verified AI agents transact using tokenised credentials. PYMNTS reported that Mastercard has also been expanding merchant-facing tools to help retailers handle a growing volume of agent-initiated transactions.
Rival network Visa struck its own partnership with Alchemy earlier in 2026 and has been promoting a competing product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, as the two networks compete to set the standard for how AI agents pay for goods online. Fortune described the dynamic as Mastercard and Visa racing “to set AI shopping payment standards.”
Why It Matters
AI shopping agents that can act without a human clicking “buy” raise practical questions for card networks: existing fraud detection is largely built around spotting non-human, automated transaction patterns — the opposite of what agentic commerce now requires. How Mastercard and Visa redesign these guardrails, including the specific spending limits merchants and cardholders can set, will shape how much autonomy consumers are willing to hand to AI agents with real purchasing power.
What’s Not Yet Clear
Neither Mastercard nor Alchemy has published detailed figures on transaction volume, adoption by specific retailers, or default guardrail settings beyond the general description of price-range limits. Those details will matter for assessing how widely this moves beyond an initial rollout.
