Ant launches AI agent accounts

Ant International introduced dedicated bank accounts for AI agents inside its WorldFirst brand. The accounts use smart contracts to verify agent identity, monitor activity in real time, and let businesses intervene when needed.

100% loss guarantee for agent errors

Ant's AgentSafePay product covers all losses when an AI agent is tricked by malicious prompts or misreads instructions. The company claims no other payments firm offers this guarantee.

Agents can pay each other instantly

Ant's Agentic Mobile Protocol settles payments between AI agents in amounts as small as $0.000001. The protocol connects 10 wallet partners and seven acquirers to a network of 150 million merchants and 2 billion consumer accounts.

Existing controls weren't built for agents

Payment systems verify people and companies, but AI agents sit between the person and the payment. Financial institutions need to know when an agent was involved, what it was cleared to do, and whether actions trace back to real human decisions.

Stripe and others build competing rails

Stripe, Coinbase and Cloudflare launched a nonprofit foundation for x402, an open-source protocol for instant software payments. Tempo introduced a separate open standard for machine payments, while Ant uses its own mobile wallet and blockchain route.

Card networks push interoperability

Visa and Mastercard are working with Ant to develop a know your agent interoperability framework. The framework aims to streamline agent onboarding and identification across card networks, wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces.

“Interoperability across know your agent frameworks is essential to making agentic commerce work at scale.”

Merchants already using AI at scale

Ant's data shows 89.5% of merchant clients using its Antom brand deployed FinAI products in the past 12 months. AI assisted 81.4% of payment tasks, though these figures are not independently audited.