Autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agents gained the ability to carry out the full shopping cycle within Alibaba’s ecosystem, including making payments.
Chinese payment service Alipay launched a delegated payments feature that allows AI agents to independently place and pay for purchases on behalf of users. The new mechanism was rolled out on Taobao, which is part of Alibaba’s ecosystem. This is reported by Reuters and several industry publications.
Taobao users can now instruct an AI assistant to search for and purchase products based on specified parameters. After identity verification via Alipay, the system receives a one-time authorization for a specific transaction, the agent monitors product prices and automatically places an order when the user’s conditions are met.
The new shopping flow works within the Taobao app and appears to the user as follows:
- Describing the desired product in a chat with an AI assistant.
- Selecting a suitable option from those suggested by the system.
- Confirming a one-time payment authorization via Alipay.
After that, the algorithm independently tracks price changes and completes the purchase once the target conditions are reached.
The feature is an extension of the Alipay AI Pay service, previously introduced for voice payments and automated transactions. According to Ant Group, by February 2026, the number of AI Pay users exceeded 100 million people, and the service processed over 120 million transactions in a single week.
Alipay stated that delegated payment technology will eventually be extended to other routine scenarios, including utility payments, travel bookings, repeat orders, and everyday shopping.
While Western solutions such as Amazon’s Rufus or ChatGPT integrations with online stores mainly focus on product discovery, Alibaba is betting on full-scale agentic commerce, where AI supports the customer across all stages, from product selection to payment, delivery, and after-sales service. In this context, the company is developing integration with its proprietary AI model Qwen, which is expected to gain access to a catalog of more than 4 billion products across Taobao and Tmall.
In November 2025, Alibaba’s retail division announced the launch of its AI Mode service, aimed at improving supplier and product search across multiple parameters, as well as introducing tokenized deposit payments to accelerate international transactions in euros and U.S. dollars.
