Visa and Mastercard have launched competing payment frameworks to enable AI shopping agents to autonomously search, compare, and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, with Visa completing hundreds of pilot transactions and predicting agentic commerce will become mainstream in 2026.
Both payment giants unveiled their protocols in October 2025, with Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol using cryptographic signatures developed with Cloudflare and Mastercard's Agent Pay framework completing U.S. rollout in November, ahead of planned global expansion in early 2026.
The infrastructure push follows OpenAI's September launch of Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, which allows purchases from Etsy and Shopify merchants without leaving the chat interface, though questions remain about liability when AI agents make purchasing errors.
