Peng Jiayan/Text

On February 25, 2025, stablecoin issuer Circle (CRCL) saw its stock price surge by over 35.5% in a single day after releasing its full-year and fourth-quarter 2025 financial results. The rally was driven not only by the financial figures themselves but also by management's explicit positioning of AI agent payments as the company's most critical growth battleground in the next phase during the earnings call.

Just two days earlier, on the seventh day of the Chinese New Year, Ant Group announced that the number of users for Alipay's "AI Pay" had surpassed 100 million during the Spring Festival, making it the world's first AI-native payment product to exceed both 100 million payment transactions and users.

Circle and Ant Group may appear to be competing in different arenas, but at their core, both are financial service platforms built on payment infrastructure. The confluence of these two signals seems to be a declaration: AI payment has transitioned from a technological concept into a real, large-scale battleground.

In fact, the world's top players in the payment ecosystem—payment companies, stablecoin institutions, international card networks, and even hardware manufacturers—have already entered the fray. The "OpenClaw moment" has officially elevated the strategic stakes of this battleground. The AI red envelope battle during the Chinese New Year was merely a minor skirmish ahead of the larger war.

 01 

Circle: Betting on the "Machine Economy Settlement Layer"

In November 2025, Austrian programmer Peter Steinberger released an open-source AI agent framework called Clawdbot on GitHub. This small project allowed users to deploy AI assistants in chat applications like WhatsApp to autonomously perform cross-application tasks such as email management, calendar scheduling, and web browsing. In late January 2026, the project unexpectedly went viral—rebranded as Moltbot and later OpenClaw following trademark complaints from Anthropic. GitHub stars quickly surpassed 145,000, making it one of the fastest-growing open-source projects in GitHub history, attracting 2 million weekly visitors and sparking widespread discussions within the community about the boundaries of AI agent capabilities.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire specifically referenced this event during the earnings call, stating that he had witnessed an incredible leap in the AI agent space and noting that developers were realizing the need for a reliable, low-cost, and trustworthy medium of exchange for transactions between agents.

In his 2025 strategic review, Jeremy Allaire stated, "This year, we also expanded our wallet infrastructure into a brand-new domain: autonomous, machine-to-machine payments... By integrating developer-controlled wallets with the x402 protocol, we enable AI agents to use USDC's autonomous payment APIs to access data, computing power, and content."

This is the underlying logic behind Circle's AI payment strategy. Its core focus is to build a Machine Economy Settlement Layer—extending stablecoin payments from human-driven to AI-driven. Supporting this ambition is the infrastructure Circle has accumulated over the past few years: USDC has been deployed across more than 30 blockchains, establishing a complete cross-chain balance model. According to the earnings call, approximately 99% of agent payments are currently settled using USDC.

In its financial report, Circle also disclosed that its Circle Gateway testnet has reduced transaction costs to as low as $0.00001 per transaction, specifically designed for high-frequency agent micropayment scenarios. Additionally, the Circle Payments Network (CPN) has officially onboarded 55 financial institutions (up from just 29 in the previous quarter), with annualized transaction volume reaching $5.7 billion.

x402 Protocol: Embedding Payments into Internet Requests

The key technological tool enabling this vision is the x402 protocol. Spearheaded by Circle's strategic partner Coinbase, it draws inspiration from the decades-old, unused 402 status code (Payment Required) in the HTTP protocol.

The logic is straightforward: When an API or web service responds to a client request, it directly returns an HTTP 402 status code along with payment requirements and amounts. Upon receiving the response, the AI agent automatically completes an on-chain payment using USDC before reinitiating the request to obtain data or services—all occurring within the standard Web request workflow without redirecting to billing pages or requiring card binding or registration.

Circle's product blog provides a concrete scenario: An AI agent conducting in-depth research tasks needs to pay per query for content access. The x402 protocol makes such granular micropayments technically feasible without any human intervention.

Circle further integrates its Gateway infrastructure with x402, introducing batch settlement mechanisms to package thousands of micropayments off-chain before unified on-chain settlement, reducing Gas costs and latency. Circle is also participating in the development of Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) standard, collaborating with Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation, and others to advance x402's cross-protocol interoperability.

Tether is not far behind

Circle's main rival, Tether, is also entering the fray. USDT's application within the x402 framework leans more toward commercial implementation: AI agents can directly settle data queries, computing power, or content access fees using USDT in HTTP requests without accounts or API keys. Cloudflare has integrated USDT into its pay-per-crawl testing feature, allowing this model to penetrate mainstream internet infrastructure. The combined market capitalization of USDC and USDT currently stands at approximately $250 billion, with these two stablecoin giants jointly defining the underlying currency form of AI payments.

 02 

Ant Group: The "Double 100 Million" Breakthrough in AI Payment

The 2026 Chinese New Year saw an intensified AI battle among Chinese internet companies, with firms vying to distribute red envelopes and boost their presence. However, in terms of payment applications, Ant Group delivered the most compelling results. According to Ant Group's official disclosure on February 23, following the 120 million weekly payment transactions recorded by "AI Pay" on February 12, its user base officially surpassed 100 million, making it the world's first AI-native payment product to exceed both 100 million payment transactions and users.

Qianwen's Spring Festival Offensive: 3 Billion Yuan in Subsidies for 4.1 Billion Interactions

Alibaba's Qianwen App served as the direct engine behind the explosive growth of "AI Pay" users. On February 2, Qianwen announced a 3 billion yuan ($420 million) "Spring Festival Hospitality Plan," marking the highest-ever investment in a Chinese New Year campaign within Alibaba's ecosystem and the largest single AI-related Spring Festival initiative among major internet companies (Baidu's Wenxin invested 500 million yuan, while Tencent's Yuanbao invested 1 billion yuan).

The campaign officially launched on February 6: Users updating the Qianwen App could claim a 25 yuan no-threshold voucher valid at over 300,000 milk tea and coffee shops nationwide, deeply integrated with Alibaba's ecosystem businesses, including Alipay, Taobao Flash Sales, Fliggy, Amap, Hema, and Tmall Supermarket.

Within three hours of launch, milk tea orders exceeded 1 million; within nine hours, orders surpassed 10 million, causing temporary server congestion. Qianwen officials stated that emergency capacity expansions were underway. During the Spring Festival, users said "Qianwen, help me" over 4.1 billion times, with AI completing 120 million orders. Taobao Flash Sales' general merchandise orders grew over eightfold in six days. Qianwen topped the Apple App Store's free chart that day. These figures indicate that, at least during this specific time window, hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers completed the full experience of "expressing intent through language → AI execution → automatic payment."

"AI Pay" Reconstructs Interaction Logic

Ant Group's "AI Pay" reconstructs the interaction logic of payments. The traditional path is "Open App → Search → Select → Place Order → Pay"; "AI Pay" follows "User Expresses Intent → AI Understands → Agent Executes → Payment Occurs Naturally." At the product level, Alipay has established three-tier security safeguards: Users must manually authorize account binding for first-time use; payments require facial recognition, fingerprint, or password verification; and Ant's real-time risk control system intercepts anomalies throughout the process, promising "You Dare Pay, We Dare Compensate."

Supporting this experience are two technological frameworks:

The first is MCP (Model Context Protocol), enabling developers to connect AI agents to Alipay's payment capabilities directly through natural language without complex coding, first launched in April 2025.

The second is the Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, jointly launched with Qianwen App and Taobao Instant Retail in January 2026, establishing a standardized framework for interactions between AI agents and merchants. Users can complete orders and payments directly within Qianwen conversations without switching apps.

Currently, "AI Pay" has launched in multiple scenarios, including Qianwen, Rokid smart glasses, and Luckin Coffee, extending payment touchpoints from smartphone screens to wearable devices.

WeChat AI Payment Takes a Different Path

Alipay's biggest competitor in payments, WeChat Pay, has taken a differentiated approach through Tencent's Yuanbao, initially targeting small and medium-sized merchants in 2025.

Take the catering (catering) scenario as an example: Merchants use Yuanbao to photograph paper menus, with AI automatically generating online ordering pages. Customers scan QR codes to check out directly within WeChat Pay, eliminating manual amount entry. Related features are embedded in the "Business Payment Code," requiring no additional app downloads.

During the 2026 Spring Festival, Tencent Yuanbao entered the fray with 1 billion yuan in red envelopes. According to reports, Tencent founder Pony Ma explicitly stated at the company's annual meeting that he hoped the campaign would replicate the success of WeChat's 2015 Spring Festival red envelope phenomenon. Users could earn cash by completing AI tasks (e.g., generating red envelope covers, participating in topics), with funds directly withdrawable to WeChat Pay, deeply linking AI usage with payment incentives to guide users toward "AI-triggered payment" behavior.

 03 

Top Players Enter the Fray

The AI payment wave has swept across major global payment institutions, rapidly reshaping the competitive landscape from infrastructure to application layers.

On January 8, 2026, Microsoft unveiled Copilot Checkout at the NRF Retail conference, allowing U.S. users to purchase items directly from brands like Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Etsy without leaving the conversation interface, with Stripe, PayPal, and Shopify providing payment infrastructure alongside each other.

Three days later (January 11), Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at NRF. Within a week, two tech giants and three payment institutions took the stage, each betting on the next generation of commerce infrastructure.

Stripe: Building Infrastructure for Agent Commerce

"Stripe has spent the last 15 years optimizing commerce for human buyers. Now we're doing the same for AI agents," said Will Gaybrick, President of Technology and Business at Stripe, in September 2025.

Earlier, in May 2025, Stripe unveiled the Payments Foundation Model at its annual developer conference, Sessions, trained on hundreds of billions of historical transactions to optimize fraud detection, dynamic payment routing, and checkout conversion. Stripe cited a specific case: Healthcare company Ro improved authorization rates by 2% and reduced dispute rates by 3% over 12 months using Stripe, recovering tens of millions of dollars in additional revenue annually.

On September 29, 2025, Stripe and OpenAI jointly launched the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), simultaneously introducing ChatGPT's Instant Checkout feature—allowing U.S. users to purchase Etsy items directly within ChatGPT conversations, later joined by over 1 million Shopify merchants including Glossier, SKIMS, Spanx, and Vuori. ACP was open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling merchants to sell across all ACP-compatible AI agents with a single integration while retaining pricing power, customer relationships, and fulfillment control.

On December 11, 2025, Stripe introduced the Agentic Commerce Suite—a solution enabling merchants to access multiple AI agents through a single integration. Retail brands like Coach, Kate Spade, URBN Group (including Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters), Revolve, and Ashley Furniture, along with e-commerce platforms Squarespace, Wix, Etsy, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, have announced their participation.

Additionally, Stripe disclosed a new product direction, Machine Payments, in its 2025 annual report: allowing developers to charge AI agents for API calls, MCP usage, and HTTP requests, settled via stablecoin micropayments down to each request.

PayPal: Transitioning from Payment Tool to AI Commerce Intermediary

On October 28, 2025, PayPal officially launched Agentic Commerce Services, comprising two core capabilities: Agent Ready enables existing merchants to accept payments in AI shopping interfaces without additional modifications, with built-in fraud detection and buyer protection; Store Sync helps merchants synchronize product catalogs, inventory, and fulfillment data to AI platforms. Initially, PayPal integrated with the AI platform Perplexity, with ChatGPT and Google Gemini slated for future integration.

"Our agent commerce services support mainstream payment protocols and AI platforms, connecting PayPal merchants directly to millions of consumers using AI agents for daily shopping needs," said Michelle Gill, General Manager of PayPal's Small Business and Financial Services.

On January 22, 2026, PayPal announced its acquisition of Cymbio, an Israeli multi-channel orchestration platform, to accelerate the expansion of agent commerce capabilities to more merchants and improve product catalog discoverability on AI platforms. The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2026, with the transaction amount undisclosed. Merchants like Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics, Ashley Furniture, and Newegg have already gone live on Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity via Store Sync.

Richard Crone, head of consulting firm Crone Consulting, believes that 'This is a major victory for PayPal. Cymbio is the largest independent product detail page source outside of AI super platforms, and product detail pages are the most critical element in agent commerce—both Visa and Mastercard's agent payment solutions require it.'

"Visa and Mastercard: Competing for Infrastructure Standards in Agent Commerce" The entry of international card organization giants has brought about a distinct strategic landscape. On October 14, 2025, Visa, in collaboration with over 10 institutions including Cloudflare, Adyen, Ant International, Microsoft, Shopify, and Stripe, launched the Trusted Agent Protocol to help merchants distinguish between malicious bots and legitimate AI agents. On December 18, 2025, Visa announced that it had jointly completed hundreds of secure AI agent-initiated transactions with ecosystem partners.

"This holiday season marks the end of an era. In 2026, AI agents will no longer be just shopping assistants—they will complete your purchases directly," said Rubail Birwadker, head of growth products and partnerships at Visa, in December 2025.

In a forecast article published in December 2025, Visa Group President Oliver Jenkyn depicted a specific scenario: Open ChatGPT, click the 'Buy for Me' button, tell the AI agent your preferences and budget, and it can autonomously place orders on your favorite websites, with the shopping cart and checkout completed by the agent—he believes this 'sounds like the future, but it's not too far away.' He also warned that in 2026, AI-driven identity attacks will significantly increase, sparking a new AI identity war.

On January 11, 2026, Google officially unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) at the NRF conference—an open-source commerce standard led by Google, jointly developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, and endorsed by over 20 institutions including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa. It covers the complete transaction chain from product discovery to settlement and after-sales, and is compatible with existing protocols such as AP2, A2A, and MCP.

Pablo Fourez, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard, stated in the UCP release announcement that open, interoperable protocols are the spark for agent commerce, and Mastercard is actively participating to embed trust, security, and responsibility into the protocol architecture from day one.

Mastercard's Agent Pay binds tokenization technology to agent identities through Agentic Tokens, integrating with UCP to address identity authentication and security issues in agent commerce in a standardized manner.

 04 

Don't Forget the Doubao Phone

On December 1, 2025, the Doubao team under ByteDance and Nubia under ZTE jointly announced the limited release of engineering prototypes of the nubia M153, equipped with a technology preview of the Doubao mobile assistant, priced at 3,499 yuan officially. Targeted at industry professionals and AI technology enthusiasts, it explicitly states, 'Ordinary consumers should proceed with caution.' Within 24 hours of release, the first batch of 30,000 units sold out in full payment; second-hand prices on Xianyu subsequently surged to 4,200 to 4,999 yuan or even higher.

Its hardware specifications are unremarkable, but it's not selling hardware. The Doubao team confirmed that this is the first consumer-grade AI phone to obtain Android's INJECT_EVENTS permission, granting the AI assistant bottom layer capabilities (low-level capabilities) to simulate user clicks and autonomously invoke cross-app functions, with a permission level far exceeding ordinary accessibility services. The official also stated: This permission requires active user authorization, sensitive actions like payments must be manually completed by the user, and screen content is not stored in the cloud or used for model training.

An official demo video showcased a typical scenario: The user says, 'Help me compare prices and place an order across all platforms,' and the Doubao mobile assistant automatically jumps to platforms like Taobao, JD.com, and Pinduoduo, searches for products, compares prices, automatically claims coupons, and adds the lowest-priced item to the cart—only asking the user to manually confirm at the payment stage.

In another scenario, the user issues the command, 'Find the cheapest flight from Chengdu to Hangzhou next Wednesday,' and the AI fills in the departure, destination, and date in a travel app, screens flights, and pushes results, assisting in completing the booking process after user confirmation.

However, the phone faced collective resistance within days of its launch. On the evening of December 2, WeChat users first experienced abnormal account logouts; on December 3, the Doubao team proactively disabled the phone assistant's ability to operate WeChat; on December 5, Doubao further announced the suspension of AI operations in high-sensitivity scenarios such as financial payments and game score farming; on December 26, mainstream apps including WeChat, Taobao, Meituan, Alipay, Pinduoduo, and Gaode Maps sequentially restricted login or AI operation functions for Doubao AI phones.

This confrontation revealed a deeper contradiction: Once AI agents bypass the ad displays and traffic distribution on app homepages to directly locate functions and complete operations, they undermine the user engagement and ad entry control rights that super apps rely on for survival. Li Liang, Vice President of Douyin, stated that the transformation brought by AI phones is real, as are user demands, and regardless of whether this attempt succeeds, AI is undoubtedly the future.

Samsung Enters the Fray

Two months later, at the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event in February 2026, Samsung and Google jointly announced the deep integration of the Gemini agent into flagship models. Unlike Doubao's engineering prototype, this represents a large-scale mass-production deployment of an 'agent portal' at the operating system level.

From Doubao's engineering prototype to Samsung's flagship models, the two-month timeline clearly outlines the pace of AI phones' transition from cutting-edge exploration to mainstream products.

Redefining the Payment Competition Landscape

The Doubao phone and Gemini phone jointly reveal an ongoing structural shift: When the initiator of payments shifts from humans to AI agents, the value of traffic entry points becomes diluted. AI agents do not choose payment channels based on user habits; they act according to protocol standards and decision-making logic. Whoever can establish a first-mover advantage at the AI agent decision-making layer—whether through open protocols, default interfaces, or ecosystem binding—stands a chance to become the core node of the next-generation payment infrastructure.

Beyond phones, other hardware terminals will also enter the fray: Smart glasses (Ant AI Pay already integrated with Rokid) already possess visual recognition-triggered payment capabilities, and the payment potential of smart speakers, in-car infotainment systems, and smart earphones cannot be ignored. The resistance temporarily faced by the Doubao phone is merely the prelude to a greater upheaval.

More AI agents are being deployed, and more machine transactions are occurring. The war over 'machine economy settlement' has just sounded its clarion call.

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