AI payment processing product from Alipay is part of the firm’s AI Pay offering. It enables businesses of all sizes, including One Person Companies (OPCs) that account for 30% of all enterprises in the Chinese mainland, to receive agentic payments seamlessly when autonomous AI agents, including OpenClaw-type agents, purchase their services or products.
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Alipay today unveiled its new A2A (agent-to-agent) payment processing service for businesses and merchants to seamlessly accept purchases made by AI agents on behalf of real customers.
Using this tool, small and medium-sized businesses do not need to build complex payment or settlement systems on their own. Instead, they can onboard their monetizable services on the platform to reach more customers and receive payment each time an AI agent purchases something from their store supply.
The functionality is especially important for One Person Companies (OPCs), as they tend to have smaller budgets and fewer opportunities to invest in high-tech payment stack. OPC, short for “One Person Company,” is a new style of entrepreneurship and organization in China. These “smart native companies” incorporate AI from the start, so that one individual, with the support of AI tools, can perform all business processes, including product development, marketing, and user services.
In 2025, China had more than 16 million one-person limited liability companies sitting on top of 124 million individual-owned businesses (similar but non AI-native category). Their number is rising quickly, largely due to AI software that replaces many traditional roles and enables business owners avoid additional hires. OPCs number now takes about 27%–30% share of all national enterprises.
To avail of the new service, AI Pay users should install the skill on their AI agent, and state their request. For example, “help me search for the latest AI technology report” or “find the best-price media subscription service”. The AI agent will handle the rest. It will inform the user of the fee required to access the paid web search, wait for confirmation, and return to purchase the premium search result once the user confirms payment via the Alipay AI Pay skill.
User-facing agentic AI transaction capabilities via voice command were deployed by Alipay in 2025. Its AI Pay is already used by more than 100 million people in China. Just recently, the service was expanded with OpenClaw-type AI agent payment function pre-installed on Alibaba Cloud’s JVS Claw, DTClaw of Ant Group Digital Technologies, and available on other OpenClaw-type AI agents, including Claude Code and Hermes Agent, through an easy installation.
One of the first businesses adopting new Alipay’s AI payment processing product is Bocha, an AI-powered search tool offering web search support for AI applications including DeepSeek. The company, transforming advanced web search capabilities into a standard, pay-per-use service, faces daily API calls surpassing 30 million. To handle these volumes easier, Bocha has deployed its paid skill “bocha-web-search-a2m” on AI agents including Alipay Tbox and Hermes Agent.
