Overview
- In mid-June, reporting shows Ant is testing an in-app AI assistant called Ah Bao that can take voice or text requests to book rides, order food, and carry out money-management actions with user approval.
- Ant has introduced two linked products in its agent plan: AI Wallet, which lets users authorize agent transactions, and Token Pay, which supplies developers with payment and credit APIs to build agent services.
- Company figures reported by coverage say Alipay’s AI Pay reached large scale earlier this year, with more than 100 million active users and a spike of about 120 million AI-agent transactions in a single week, according to those reports.
- Ant’s Token Pay and AI Wallet operate on centralized payment rails using API tokens and digital credits rather than blockchain assets, a design choice that keeps control inside Ant’s infrastructure.
- The rollout intensifies platform rivalry with Tencent’s WeChat, could change how people transact daily by handing routine buying and finance tasks to agents, and creates pressure on crypto-native projects and developer business models to adapt.