Visa Crypto Labs, an internal division of the Visa payment network, announced on March 18 its first experimental product, the Visa CLI. It is a command line interface (CLI) tool that enables artificial intelligence (AI) agents to perform Visa card fiat payments directly from a terminal without human intervention.
Cuy Sheffield, director of Visa Crypto Labs, said after its launch that it “First experimental product from Visa Crypto Labs”. If you want to work with a trial version of the CLI, you can do so from your GitHub account.
Visa CLI uses tokenized Visa credentials. Digital representation of the card The actual data is not published and is used by agents to approve payments in real-time. These credentials are embedded within the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open source standard for machine-to-machine payments announced on March 18 by Stripe and Tempo, cryptocurrency networks aimed at agent payments. Visa joined as a design partner for MPP and built extensions to enable the use of cards within that protocol.
Visa CLI runs on top of traditional Visa rails and processes fiat payments. Payments with cryptocurrencies or stablecoins are not supported Although for now MPP is designed with future compatibility with these rails in mind.
Role of MPP protocol in Visa CLI
According to the MPP documentation, this protocol defines a complete flow of autonomous transactions. When an agent requests a resource, the service responds with payment requirements and Agent allows use of tokenized credentials And the service will be delivered. without a browser. No redirect to payment page.
Use cases described by Visa include paying for image and music generation APIs, accessing paid databases, and defraying computing costs while programming.
Delegating payments to AI is not without risks
Automating payments using AI agents introduces new errors. As reported by CriptoNoticias, this example occurred in mid-February. In that case, decentralized finance protocols Moonwell lost $1.7 million executing AI-generated smart contracts This sets the asset’s price at $1.12 instead of the actual $2,200. This bug passed all human reviews before being deployed.
Although Visa CLI is currently in closed beta and actual usage is limited, this launch signals a clear positioning. The world’s largest payments network is building the infrastructure for autonomous commerce before the market matures, with one foot on traditional rails and the other in programmable payments.
