Alipay Wants AI Agents to Handle Your Payments — But Who’s Really in Control?

• Alipay’s new AI Wallet raises a question worth asking: when your AI agent spends your money, what oversight do you actually have?
• Token Pay signals Alipay is positioning itself as the default payment backbone for AI model companies, a quiet but significant land grab in the emerging AI economy.

When Meituan launched its Xiaomei AI agent in late 2025, executives described it internally not as a chatbot but as an orchestrator, one that could take a request like “order my usual lunch, but deliver it 20 minutes later,” interpret the intent, apply user preferences, and complete the transaction with zero screen interaction. That’s not a concept in a lab. That’s how a segment of Chinese consumers already shops, and agentic commerce payments are the infrastructure gap nobody has cleanly solved, until now, Alipay argues.

AI agents can order your coffee and book your ride. What they’ve lacked is a payment layer built to match, and that’s precisely what Alipay is now moving to own. On May 26, Ant Group’s Alipay introduced its full-stack AI payment solution at the Alipay AI Payment Ecosystem Conference in Hangzhou, debuting two new services: AI Wallet, which it claims is the world’s first, and Token Pay, a dedicated platform for AI model companies.

Alipay AI Pay, its consumer-facing product, surpassed 100 million users in February 2026 and has processed 300 million transactions to date, giving Alipay a credible claim to being the world’s first commercially scaled AI-native payment infrastructure.

The agentic commerce payments problem: Execution was never the issue

The harder problem with agentic commerce payments isn’t whether an AI agent can complete a transaction; it’s accountability. When an agent is authorised to spend on your behalf, the user needs meaningful oversight without being pulled back into manually approving every purchase.

AI Wallet is Alipay’s answer to that. Searchable directly within the Alipay app, it lets users manage tasks that AI agents execute before and during payment, and review spending afterwards, a control layer sitting between the user and the agent.

To underpin trust at the infrastructure level, Alipay also launched China’s first Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, a common language for collaboration between AI and service platforms, along with an intelligent security system that covers every agent-driven transaction.

“As AI agents begin helping people search for information, shop, order food, and even make money, payments are no longer just the ‘final step’; they are becoming a capability embedded from the very beginning,” said Lin Zhu, general manager of Alipay’s AI payment business at Ant Group. “Only when trusted transactions, seamless payments and secure controls are all in place can agentic commerce truly take off.”

Token Pay: A payment layer for the AI model economy

Token Pay takes a different angle. Built specifically for AI model companies, it offers a consolidated solution for global subscription payments, token top-ups within AI agents, and related transaction needs, the kind of payment flows that existing infrastructure wasn’t designed to handle cleanly.

At the conference, Chinese AI firms MiniMax and Stepfun announced they would adopt Alipay’s full-stack solution across token top-ups, membership subscriptions, and marketing campaigns. “Payments play a crucial role in enabling tenfold growth in the AI industry,” said Weiqi Hu, VP of MiniMax.

How far the agentic commerce payments infrastructure already reaches

Alipay’s AI payment services are already active across smart glasses like Rokid’s, AI assistants, including Alibaba’s Qwen, development platforms, in-car systems, and retail apps, embedded across a wide cross-section of China’s AI ecosystem, not confined to any single vertical.

Ant Group CEO Cyril Han framed the broader ambition directly: “The emergence of AI agents is reshaping everything. Drawing on 22 years of technological expertise and commercial know-how, Alipay is building a new generation of AI payment services to accelerate the growth of the agentic commerce ecosystem.”

Alipay is also rolling out a developer support program for individual AI developers, offering token incentives and zero payment processing fees. What Alipay is really selling, to users, developers, and AI companies alike, is the idea that agentic commerce payments can be trusted. That’s more likely a harder thing to build than a wallet.

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