UnionPay Launches Agentic Payment Open Protocol — First Major Payment Network to Ship Agent-Native Payments

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UnionPay released APOP (Agentic Payment Open Protocol), a protocol framework for AI agents to initiate and complete payments across UnionPay's global acceptance network, with a live demo on April 2 in Hong Kong where an AI assistant booked and paid for a taxi autonomously. The protocol addresses four key challenges: regulatory compliance, agent identity verification with traceable intent management, responsibility/risk allocation for dispute resolution, and broad compatibility for agents, merchants, and financial institutions. Combined with Visa's AI-to-AI commerce report from the same week, this signals the agentic payments infrastructure layer is being built in parallel by the world's largest payment networks.