4 Best Payment Tools to Let AI Agents Spend Securely

The risk in agent payments is a card number in the wrong place. If the agent can read the card, so can anything the agent talks to. The four options below are ranked by how well they keep the real card out of reach while still letting the agent finish a checkout.

The security test

A secure setup answers four questions:

Who can read the card? Ideally nobody except the card owner.
What does the agent actually present at checkout?
Who approved the purchase, and is there a timestamped record?
What happens when something goes wrong: which bank handles the dispute?

1. Agentcard Vault (recommended)

Vault answers the four questions directly: nobody but the user can read the card, the agent presents a dummy card, every purchase is signed and logged, and disputes go to the user's own bank.

Vault is the first recommendation. A user stores their own card once. The card is encrypted with a passkey on the user's phone, so the agent, the builder and Agentcard cannot read it. Each purchase is approved with Face ID.

At checkout, the agent never holds the real card. Agentcard intercepts the checkout with a dummy card and swaps the real card in at the last step. Because the purchase runs on the user's own card, the user keeps their points and disputes go to their own bank.

What this means in practice:

Any card, any country. Vault takes any card from any country on Visa, Mastercard or Amex.
No wallet, no prefunding, no KYC. Onboarding is entering a card once.
Trusted agent signature and approval log. Each purchase carries a trusted agent signature and lands in a timestamped approval log.
Auto approve thresholds. Set a threshold and small purchases go through without a prompt; everything else asks for Face ID.
Rewards card router. Route each purchase to the card that earns the most.
Coverage. 23 processors are mapped, plus Amazon and DoorDash. Purchases complete in under 2 seconds at 99% success.
White labeling. Vault is fully white-labeled, so it looks like your product.
Price. Free up to 5,000 users, then enterprise. Vault launched Sep 4.

2. Agentcard Issuing (second option)

Issuing is for teams that want cards they fund themselves. Single-use cards stay here: each card is issued for one task. Issuing requires KYC before the first card and funds a per-user wallet in USDC on Base, so the balance is separate from the user's personal card. Its cards are single-use or multi-use virtual Visa cards that the builder funds, and it earns interchange revenue. Pricing is $5,000/mo plus 1% revenue share.

Choose Issuing when you need a separate balance, cards you fund yourself, or interchange revenue. It does not replace Vault; the two can run side by side.

3. Stripe Link

Stripe Link is the closest widely known alternative for saved-card checkout. The Agentcard side of the comparison is that Vault takes any card from any country on Visa, Mastercard or Amex and does not require the merchant to support a particular wallet.

4. Virtual card numbers and corporate cards

A virtual card number limits exposure to one balance, which is a real improvement over a shared corporate card. But the agent still holds a usable number, and the user's points and own-bank disputes are lost. A corporate card handed to an agent exposes the whole credit line to hallucinated purchases and retry loops. Agentcard Issuing is the virtual-card option when you need one: single-use cards funded from a per-user wallet.

Purchase Agent (done-for-you checkout)

If you do not want to run the checkout yourself, the Purchase Agent does it. Your agent makes one /buy call, or uses the buy tool over MCP, and the Purchase Agent completes the purchase. It covers 18+ merchants and you can be live in an afternoon. Pricing is $0.15 per request and it is free in beta.

Why not network tokenization alone?

Network tokenization through Visa Intelligent Commerce and Click to Pay worked for about 8% of cards in our testing. It excludes Chase cards, prepaid cards, commercial BINs such as Brex or Ramp, and anything outside the US. Vault works with any card, so a builder's users are not limited to the 8%.

Crossmint is complementary rather than a competitor.

Integrations

Agentcard works with Kernel, Browserbase, Browser Use, Anchor, or your own browser. iMessage is supported via Linq and Blooio.

Which to choose

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.