Visa and OpenAI Tie Up to Let AI Agents Authorize Payments

Visa and OpenAI want AI agents to pay for things, and they want Visa to handle the transaction.

The card network said it will provide the rails for developers and merchants to accept payments initiated by AI agents, using Visa's credentialing system and security infrastructure. The deal covers OpenAI's platforms, with the companies also exploring enterprise applications tied to Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, Visa said in a press release Wednesday.

The structure matters because of how it controls the money. Transactions will operate within user-defined permissions: spending limits, approved merchant categories, and required approvals before execution. Payments use tokenized Visa credentials, real-time authorization, and fraud monitoring, the release said.

“As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless,” said Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer.

Marco Mahrus, head of partnerships and commerce at OpenAI, said agents will take on a growing role in purchases and more complex transactions. “By integrating with Visa Intelligent Commerce, we're building the infrastructure for secure, transparent and user-controlled agentic transactions,” he said.

Visa launched the Intelligent Commerce program in April 2025, opening the network's rails to AI agents. Five modules at launch covered authentication, tokenization, payment instructions, personalization, and the risk signals used in dispute resolution.

Mark Nelsen, now Visa's head of product for commercial and money movement solutions, said at the time that “This is going to transform shopping and buying.”

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, recently told staff an IPO could come within 12 months. The Visa partnership gives OpenAI's future public-market story something concrete beyond model subscription revenue – a payments-layer integration that ties agent commerce to a regulated financial network. For Visa, it locks in a role in a transaction flow that bypasses traditional checkout interfaces entirely.

The risk is timing. Consumer adoption of agent-driven shopping is early, and issuers will need to update their fraud models to distinguish between a user's own transaction and one an agent initiated on their behalf. Visa's security toolkit – tokenization, real-time scoring, user-defined controls – is the same set it used to sell merchants on accepting card-not-present transactions two decades ago. The bet is that the same pitch works again, this time for machines.

A shareholder would want to see the volume numbers from the Intelligent Commerce module before pricing the upside. No figures were released Wednesday. For now, the partnership is an infrastructure deal between two network-effect businesses, each making a claim on a transaction flow that does not yet exist at scale.