Ant International, the overseas affiliate of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, is making a major bid to power the next phase of mobile payments: letting autonomous artificial intelligence agents handle your electronic wallet to make purchases.
The company on Friday open-sourced its Agentic Mobile Protocol (AMP) on GitHub, effectively putting it forward as a potential global technical standard for how AI agents securely pay for real-world goods.
AMP was built onto Ant International’s existing Alipay+ cross-border network, which connects to 10 major Asian digital wallets serving 1.5 billion consumer accounts for an initial phase, according to the company.
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The protocol’s release would “enable agents to enter existing mobile payment systems as trusted actors”, allowing platforms like Alipay in mainland China, AlipayHK in Hong Kong, Starryblu in Singapore, and KakaoPay or Toss in South Korea to accelerate their AI strategies, said Yang Jiang-ming, Ant International’s chief innovation officer.
Beyond Asia, Ant International on Thursday also announced a joint effort with credit card giants Visa and Mastercard on a so-called know-your-agent (KYA) framework, an effort to establish standardised identity verification for AI agents across card networks, digital wallets and online marketplaces globally, the company said.
The launches come as tech firms increasingly focus on autonomous AI agents capable of carrying out end-to-end commercial tasks.
Speaking at a conference in Shanghai this week, Ant Group CEO Cyril Han Xinyi said that many Chinese merchants still struggled to adapt their services into formats AI agents could navigate, limiting their participation in the emerging agent economy.
Spun off in 2024, Ant International aims to build the world’s largest agentic AI payment network. Its Alipay+ network, launched in 2020, has connected more than 150 million merchants to over 2 billion user accounts across Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
In July, Ant International raised about US$1.2 billion to accelerate international growth in its first known funding round, with existing backers Ant Group and Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the South China Morning Post – taking part.
To address consumer privacy and security risks tied to automated spending, the company said AMP included an AgentSafePay feature, which offered merchants a money-back guarantee to cover potential losses related to agent-initiated transactions.
The protocol also established “clear boundaries of permissions” so consumers could retain ultimate control over their accounts, the company said.
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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.
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