Visa has announced a partnership with OpenAI aimed at bringing secure payment capabilities to agentic AI payments.

The collaboration will see Visa's payments infrastructure integrated into OpenAI platforms, enabling AI agents to initiate transactions on behalf of users while operating within predefined controls and permissions.

Announced at the Visa Payments Forum in San Francisco, the partnership forms part of Visa's broader Intelligent Commerce initiative, which focuses on extending payment capabilities into emerging digital environments.

Under the agreement, Visa said it will provide its global payments network, tokenisation technology and security infrastructure to support agentic commerce, a model in which AI agents complete purchases and other financial transactions on behalf of consumers and businesses.

The companies said developers and merchants will be able to accept Visa payments initiated by AI agents through OpenAI experiences. Transactions will be governed by user-defined controls, including spending limits, merchant restrictions and approval requirements.

Visa said the platform will use tokenised payment credentials alongside real-time authorisation and fraud monitoring capabilities to help maintain security and consumer protection.

The companies added they also plan to explore a range of enterprise use cases, including developer-focused experiences powered by Codex and more automated conversational workflows.

"AI will transform commerce more profoundly than the internet or mobile technology ever did,” said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless.

“That's the infrastructure we're building with partners like OpenAI."

Agentic commerce is a rapidly developing area, with corporations and governments working to develop standards and guardrails at the same pace. In April, Google announced it would donate its Agent Payments Protocol to the FIDO Alliance to help set up secure and interoperable standards for agentic commerce.

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