Mastercard announced a partnership with Alchemy to offer consumers an agentic payments option that lets an AI agent use a virtual Mastercard to make online purchases without human approval before every transaction. Users can set spending caps, restrict merchants and require approval for selected purchases. The service builds on Mastercard's Agent Pay program, introduced in April 2025, and uses agentic tokens: one-time or session-limited credentials designed to reduce the value of intercepted payment data. The move intensifies competition with Visa, which has partnered with Alchemy, launched its Intelligent Commerce Connect platform and worked with Ant International on frameworks for verifying and monitoring AI agents across payment networks. Consumer trust remains a major barrier. Visa research found that 23% of U.S. consumers trust generative AI to manage payments, while separate research among U.S. and U.K. fashion shoppers found that only 7% would allow autonomous purchases under predefined conditions. Mastercard's Verifiable Intent system is intended to record who authorized an agent and what it was allowed to buy, helping establish whether a transaction followed the user's instructions. Mastercard has not specified who would ultimately be responsible for purchases made outside those instructions.