Alipay launches AI payments for businesses

Alipay said on April 28 that it launched an AI payment processing product for businesses and one-person companies in mainland China to accept payments when autonomous AI agents buy their services.

The product lets merchants sell services to AI agents without building their own payment systems.

Bocha, a China-based AI search tool, has adopted the service for a paid web search feature that users can access through AI agents.

The launch follows Alipay AI Pay, a consumer product introduced in 2025 for payments made through AI agents.

🔗 Source: Alipay

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Alipay’s AI payment product leaves open questions about liability and fraud controls

If an AI agent makes a payment, it is still unclear who covers losses from mistakes or fraud. Alipay’s April 28 launch announcement does not answer that 1.
Ant International’s merchant-payments unit, Antom, handles this in its agentic-commerce stack with EasySafePay. The service holds payment credentials and takes on account-takeover liability through a “you spend, we cover” guarantee 1.
That promise relies on Antom Shield, Antom’s in-house risk engine. It uses graph analytics plus transformer-based models to check whether an AI agent’s actions match the user’s original intent, including the approved service and price 1.

Ant is trying to become the infrastructure for agentic commerce

The launch fits Ant International’s wider effort to build the rails for agentic commerce, where AI agents start transactions for users 1.
Antom has said making money from this is not the immediate goal. Future revenue could come from revenue-sharing as AI agents develop into traffic sources and sales channels 1.
Ant International is centering its agentic-payments plan on alternative payment methods (APMs), including digital wallets and bank transfers, instead of card-first models. The company says that approach better fits markets where those methods lead, including parts of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East 1.