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Mastercard Wants AI To Become Your Personal Shopper—Would You Trust It With Your Credit Card?

Mastercard is preparing for a future in which the person using your credit card may not actually be a person. Through a partnership with AI startup Alchemy, Mastercard is enabling consumers to give artificial-intelligence agents access to virtual payment credentials, allowing those agents to make purchases within predetermined boundaries. A user could limit how much an AI can spend, restrict it to particular merchants or products, or require approval before certain transactions. The concept turns AI from a tool that merely recommends what to buy into one that can potentially complete the entire shopping process. Mastercard is not alone: Visa has also partnered with Alchemy, while other major payment companies are developing infrastructure for agent-driven commerce. Yet the convenience comes with an obvious question. If consumers are uncomfortable giving an AI bot permission to spend their money, the technology may struggle to move beyond early adopters.