As AI agents start completing real purchases, an obvious question follows: how does the agent pay without you handing it your actual credit card? Pasting your real card number into an agent is the worst option. It gives software unrestricted, ongoing access to your money with no scope and no easy way to revoke it. There are much safer approaches.
Single-use virtual cards
A single-use virtual card is a card number generated for one specific purchase, then closed. The agent uses it to complete that transaction and it cannot be reused afterward. Your real card is never exposed, and the damage from anything going wrong is capped at that one scoped card. This is the model AgentPays uses: each approved purchase gets its own single-use card.
Scoped payment tokens
Card networks have introduced tokenization for agents, where your existing card is converted into a scoped token rather than a fresh card. The token carries limits and the agent never sees the underlying card number. Visa and Mastercard have both launched frameworks along these lines. The benefit is that it works from a card you already have; the tradeoff is that access to these networks is often gated through partners.
Spending controls and approval
The payment mechanism is only half of it. The other half is control: limiting how much an agent can spend, restricting which merchants it can use, and requiring human approval above a threshold. Without these, even a safe card type can be spent in ways you did not intend. The strongest setups combine a scoped payment method (so your real card is never exposed) with rules and human oversight (so the agent only spends how you want).
What to insist on
Whatever the underlying method, a few things matter: your real card details should never reach the agent, every purchase should be limitable and revocable, and you should have a clear record of what was bought. If a payment approach cannot give you those, it is not ready to hand to an autonomous agent.
How AgentPays approaches it
AgentPays issues a single-use virtual card for each approved purchase, so the agent never sees your real card. You set spending limits and merchant rules, approve anything over a threshold, and get a full audit trail.