Alchemy has plugged its AI-driven identity and payment service directly into the Visa network, giving AI agents the ability to complete commercial transactions for the first time. The integration, built on Visa Intelligent Commerce and a new product called AgentCard, lets agents built on models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or any other provider make purchases on behalf of users.
How AgentCard works with Visa Intelligent Commerce
AgentCard is a tokenized credential that sits inside Alchemy's service. When an AI agent needs to pay for something — a software license, a cloud compute instance, a subscription — it presents the card through Visa's Intelligent Commerce infrastructure. The system validates the agent's identity and authorizes the transaction without requiring a human to enter a credit card number each time.
Visa Intelligent Commerce is designed to handle machine-to-machine payments at scale. By tying it to Alchemy's identity layer, which already verifies users and their agents, the combined system can authenticate both the agent and the underlying human account. That means the payment is traceable back to a real person, even if the agent acts autonomously.
What this means for AI agents
Until now, AI agents could request actions — like “book a flight” or “order office supplies” — but the actual payment step usually required a human to approve and enter payment details. With this integration, the agent can execute the full commercial flow on its own, as long as the human has pre-authorized spending limits and identity verification is in place.
The service works with agents built on any large language model. Alchemy's system abstracts away the differences between providers, so an OpenAI-based agent and an Anthropic-based agent both use the same identity and payment interface. Developers don't need to integrate separately with each model provider's payment methods.
Alchemy's own identity verification process remains a separate layer. The company already verifies users through government IDs, biometrics, and other checks. That verified identity is then attached to the agent, so Visa sees only the verified credential — not the agent's internal logic or the model behind it.
Security and control for human overseers
Human users set spending caps and choose which merchants or categories their agents can transact with. Alchemy's dashboard shows every transaction the agent has made, including the time, amount, and what the agent said it was buying. Users can revoke access at any time.
The integration also includes real-time fraud scoring from Visa. If a transaction looks unusual — say an agent tries to spend five times its usual daily limit — the system can flag it, pause the transaction, and ask the human to approve or deny it. That keeps the agent's autonomy intact while giving humans a safety net.
Visa's move to open its network to AI agents through AgentCard signals that the payments giant sees machine-initiated transactions as a growing market. Alchemy's existing identity infrastructure gives it a head start in verifying who — or what — is behind each payment request.
The service is live now. Developers can start integrating by connecting their AI agents to Alchemy's API and issuing an AgentCard through the Visa Intelligent Commerce pipeline. Early use cases include automated cloud cost management, AI-assisted e-commerce, and subscription procurement for virtual assistants.
