In the past week, five institutions almost simultaneously showed their trump cards in the field of AI payment.
WeChat Pay launched the “AI Exclusive Card”, Alipay launched the AI version of “Abao”, UnionPay Business launched “Conversation as Transaction”, JD.com released the first domestic smart autonomous payment protocol A2P2, and Ant International launched the mobile smart smart protocol AMP globally.
This intensive round of releases is no coincidence. It means that the payment industry is officially entering the “smart payment era” from the “mobile payment era”, and the focus of competition has shifted from user scale to the right to formulate payment rules and standards in the AI era.
On June 17, WeChat Pay officially released the AI exclusive card, which is a dedicated account built into WeChat change and completely isolated from the main account.
Users need to recharge by themselves, earmark funds for their own use, and each transaction needs to be confirmed on the mobile phone.
Currently, it only supports use in Tencent’s desktop office smart WorkBuddy, and the scenario is only Meituan Life Services, such as “I want to drink a cup of milk tea, get a coupon first and then place an order.”
One day ago, Alipay’s AI version “A Bao” opened an invitation test.
This is the “biggest revision in history”. Alipay has completed structural reconstruction – the homepage has been simplified into the “Abao” dialog box and asset page. Users can call tens of thousands of services on the platform with just one sentence, completing the entire process from querying provident funds to ordering takeout.
As of May 2026, the number of Alipay AI payments has exceeded 300 million, supporting 95% of general agent frameworks.
The two paths are completely different.
WeChat Pay chose a lightweight approach, superimposing a capital isolation layer on the original structure to control the cost of trial and error; Alipay chose full-end AI reconstruction with the intention of creating a super portal of “conversation as a service”.
Behind this lies the difference in ecological genes and strategic focus between the two.
Compared with the competition of C-end experience, JD.com and UnionPay have set their sights on lower-level infrastructure.
On June 11, JD.com released A2P2, China’s first intelligent autonomous payment protocol, which for the first time divided the autonomy of AI payment into six levels from L0 to L5, focusing on L3 and L4 levels.
The core of the protocol is to allow the system to intelligently decide payments based on user intentions, rather than having people manually confirm each transaction.
To this end, JD.com pioneered ARI triple identity verification, which simultaneously verifies user identity, agent identity and operating environment at the moment of payment, and cooperates with the full-link certificate chain to ensure that every AI transaction is traceable and auditable.
On June 16, UnionPay Business launched an AI payment product. This product follows the “Intelligent Payment Open Protocol Framework” (APOP) issued by China UnionPay and opens up the entire link of “consultation-selection-order-payment”. It has now been implemented in three high-frequency scenarios of food reservation, cloud payment, and AI ordering in the park.
UnionPay Business provides two types of access solutions: merchants with existing smartphones can connect through the interface, and merchants without smartphones can enjoy end-to-end full-process construction services.
In this standards competition, Ant International’s layout is particularly special.
On June 8, Ant International officially launched the mobile intelligence protocol AMP for global e-wallets, super applications and digital banks.
The core positioning of AMP is to establish a unified access language for AI agents in cross-border payment scenarios.
For the first time, it integrates the five major modules of agent identity, authorization, payment, settlement and trust, and introduces the KYA (Know Your Agent) agent certification system to establish a unified trust rating standard for global agents. At the same time, Ant’s “Dare to Pay, Dare to Compensate” mechanism is extended to agent transaction scenarios.
AMP’s differentiating advantage is its global network.
It relies on Ant International’s Alipay+ global network, which has connected more than 2 billion consumer accounts and 150 million merchants, covering more than 200 countries and regions.
In terms of cross-border implementation, AMP has completed local payment system adaptation in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan), the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain) and Latin America (Mexico).
It has also partnered with Google Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and became the first smart card payment partners of Visa and Mastercard.
The global intelligent commercial market is expected to grow from US$5.7 billion in 2025 to US$28 billion in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 46%.
AMP attempts to become the “TCP/IP protocol” for cross-border payments in the AI era, but the challenges are equally huge.
The global mobile payment market is highly fragmented. AMP needs to complete a large amount of local compliance transformation and docking work. At the same time, it also has to face competition from multiple sets of standards such as Google UCP, Visa, Mastercard, and domestic UnionPay APOP.
Yang Tao, deputy director of the National Finance and Development Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that this round of releases marks that the payment industry has directly entered the “protocol standardization game” stage.
Behind the scenes is competition in business models. Major institutions are essentially trying to seize the new rule-making power and core entrance to digital business in the AI era.
In this game, the cards of each player are clear: WeChat Pay takes a lightweight route, Alipay takes a full-link reconstruction, UnionPay relies on the UnionPay APOP specification, JD.com is betting on the autonomous smart payment protocol A2P2, and Ant International is trying to establish a voice in the field of cross-border smart payment by relying on its global network.
The end of the game is still early, but one thing is no longer in dispute: whoever can take the lead in establishing a trusted, secure, and open intelligent payment standard will hold the core ticket for the next round of digital commerce.
