Credit card companies are racing to claim a place at the checkout when AI agents start shopping on behalf of consumers—even as shoppers remain skeptical of letting bots spend their money.
Mastercard rolled out a payment option Thursday that lets people give an AI agent a virtual card and allow it to buy things online without checking in before each purchase. Cardholders can limit how much it spends, restrict which retailers it buys from, or require approval before checkout.
"This is a land grab for infrastructure standards," Phil Bruno, chief strategy and growth officer at payments company ACI Worldwide, told Fortune. "If they set the standards for agentic commerce, they can keep the commerce in their environments for decades to come."
Rival Visa partnered with Alchemy earlier this year and has also announced its own AI shopping and payment product, Visa Intelligent Commerce, which the company says is still being deployed. Similarly, Meta has Muse, which can search for products and navigate checkout, but presents the purchase for the user's final approval.
It seems, though, that shoppers appear far more interested in using AI to find a deal than letting it pay. Just 7% of U.S. and U.K. consumers surveyed who buy fashion items said they would allow an AI ***** istant to make purchases without approval under predefined conditions, according to research commissioned by ACI Worldwide. More than half said they were uncomfortable allowing AI to purchase on their behalf.

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