Alchemy said on September 17, 2026, that its AgentCard platform now issues Mastercard payment credentials to AI agents. The announcement went out at 10 a.m. ET (4 p.m. in Paris). An agent can now pay anywhere Mastercard is accepted online, using single-use tokens tied to a card the customer already holds.
The agent never gets the customer’s card, or an account of its own. It receives a tokenized credential, valid for one purchase and linked to the existing card account. The card’s limits, benefits, and loyalty program all stay in place.
Agents get their own identity and single-use tokens
A developer provisions the agent from a command-line interface, a step Alchemy says takes under a minute. The agent gets its own identity, then tokenized, single-use Mastercard credentials. The setup runs on Mastercard Agent Pay, the framework the network launched in April 2025, and on Verifiable Intent, the layer meant to prove that an agent stayed within the instructions it was given. The controls include:
- spending limits set in advance by the cardholder and the issuer
- restrictions to approved merchant categories
- limits on where transactions are allowed
- a record linking the customer’s instruction, the agent’s action, and the transaction
“The future of commerce isn’t just about agents that can act—it’s about agents that can be trusted to act on your behalf,” said Sherri Haymond, executive vice president of digital commercialization at Mastercard. Nikil Viswanathan, Alchemy’s co-founder and CEO, said, “AI agents are quickly moving from simple assistants to software that can take action for people.”
Proof of intent keeps disputes manageable
A card network runs on confidence that a payment truly commits the cardholder. Agents break that assumption. Software triggers the transaction, possibly hours after the instruction, at a merchant the cardholder did not pick. Without proof of intent, disputes become unmanageable, and the cost lands on the issuer or the merchant.
It also turns fraud teams’ work on its head. “We’ve built a bunch of risk rules over time that were intended to stop a bot from transacting,” Greg Ulrich, Mastercard’s chief AI and data officer, told Gizmodo. “Now we need to enable the bot to transact, so that requires a change to our risk framework and our risk rules.”
AI use is growing faster than trust
About 132 million US consumers use AI, according to figures cited in a PYMNTS interview with Chiro Aikat, Mastercard’s US co-president. Yet their willingness to let an agent complete the purchase is falling. Consumers accept an agent’s advice, but they hesitate to hand over the final step. “I think that delegation and adoption don’t follow the same linear curve,” Aikat said.
Liability questions are still open
Three questions remain unanswered, and none of them is technical. Who is liable for a purchase an agent got wrong? How does a cardholder prove they never gave the instruction? And when can an issuer decline an agent without declining its customer? The answers will decide whether agentic payments go mainstream or remain a closely watched niche channel.
Meanwhile, the race between the two big networks is on. Alchemy first connected to Visa’s agentic framework in June, before adding Mastercard’s in September. For merchants, the upshot is straightforward: both networks will arrive with their own proof of intent, and merchants will need to read both.