Card companies are on a ‘land grab’ to set the standards for AI shopping, even as consumers aren’t yet comfortable handing over purchases to a bot

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........

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