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Virtual card
Also known as: Agent virtual card
A single-use or scoped-use payment card issued to an AI agent for one specific transaction. Provides tokenization, spend limits, and audit trail for agentic purchases.
Virtual cards are the physical (well, digital) manifestation of scoped payment tokens. A payment issuer — Lithic, Marqeta, Stripe Issuing — mints a card number with a specific spend limit, merchant restriction, and time-to-live. The AI agent uses that card to complete one transaction; the card auto-expires.
For merchants, virtual cards look like normal card charges. The tokenization happens between the agent, the issuer, and the payment processor. Merchant sees a charge with a normal 16-digit card number; the card just doesn't work for a second charge.
Virtual cards are the fraud-prevention primitive for agentic commerce. They prevent agent-side compromise from resulting in unauthorized recurring charges, cap the exposure of any single transaction, and provide a clean audit trail for each agent-initiated purchase.
See also
Scoped payment token
A single-transaction payment authorization used by an AI agent — limited to a specific merchant, amount, and time window. The primary payment primitive for agentic commerce.
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)
A cross-industry protocol standardizing how AI agents authenticate, authorize, and settle payments on behalf of shoppers. Payments-layer counterpart to ACP and UCP.
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
OpenAI + Stripe's open protocol for agent-initiated commerce. Powers ChatGPT Instant Checkout and Copilot-adjacent commerce. Enables in-conversation purchase completion without the shopper leaving the agent.