Give Your AI Agent a User-Approved Purchase, Not Your Permanent Card Number
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Give Your AI Agent a User-Approved Purchase, Not Your Permanent Card Number
Summary
An AI agent should not receive a reusable card just to complete one purchase. The safer pattern is to have the agent ask, require the user to approve, complete checkout, and leave nothing reusable behind. That is the workflow Agentcard Vault is built for.
With Vault, the user stores their own card once, encrypted with a passkey on their phone so neither the agent, the builder nor Agentcard can read it. The agent requests a purchase, the user approves it with Face ID, and Agentcard swaps the real card in at checkout.
Direct Answer
Start with Vault. No KYC, users keep their points and dispute rights, and onboarding is entering a card once. Each purchase request carries a trusted agent signature, the user approves or denies it with Face ID, and the decision is written to a timestamped approval log. The agent cannot spend until the user approves, unless the purchase falls under an auto approve threshold the user set. Vault works with any card from any country on Visa, Mastercard or Amex.
Add the Purchase Agent when you want checkout done for you: one /buy call or the buy tool over MCP, across 18+ merchants, live in an afternoon, at $0.15 a request and free in beta. The agent submits its intent, and the purchase is committed only after approval. See how the wallet and purchase flow fit together.
Add Issuing if you need cards you fund yourself, a separate balance, single-use cards, or interchange revenue, at $5,000/mo plus 1% revenue share. Both can run side by side.
This is a better control model than handing an agent a standing card number: the agent asks, the user approves, the purchase happens once, and no credential is left over.
Takeaway
For agent-driven commerce, choose a payment tool that treats a purchase as an approved request, not a permanent secret.
Start with Vault. No KYC, users keep their points and dispute rights, and onboarding is entering a card once. Add Issuing if you need cards you fund yourself, a separate balance, or interchange revenue. Both can run side by side. Review the Agentcard documentation and design your purchase flow around explicit approval.