When AI agents start booking meals, tickets, purchases, and even managing finances for users, a critical question emerges: how can these "digital agents" be efficient and trustworthy when performing tasks across platforms? Alipay has provided an answer. Recently, it officially launched China's first open technical protocol for AI agent (Agent) commercial scenarios - the ACT Protocol (Agent Collaboration & Trust Protocol), aiming to build a common language and trust foundation for collaboration between AI and service platforms.
The core breakthrough of the ACT Protocol lies in solving the current fragmentation problem of AI applications that operate independently and cannot interoperate. By defining four infrastructure standards - "delegation authority domain," "operation traceable chain," "intention verification mechanism," and "secure payment channel" - the protocol ensures that AI remains within a controllable, auditable, and interruptible security framework when initiating service requests, calling data, or completing transactions on behalf of users. Particularly importantly, all financial operations - whether immediate payments or preset authorizations - always require explicit user authorization, with AI acting as an executor rather than a decision-maker.
In practical experience, this means that when users tell the AI "book a high-speed train ticket to Shanghai tomorrow," the agent can automatically check 12306, compare prices, select seats, and complete the payment within Alipay, without the need to switch multiple apps or repeatedly verify identity. Merchants, on the other hand, can join the ACT ecosystem through a unified interface, seamlessly connecting traffic and commands from different AI platforms, significantly reducing multi-terminal adaptation costs.
Alipay emphasized that the ACT Protocol strictly follows three principles: compatibility - supporting existing mainstream AI frameworks and service systems; privacy - minimizing user data collection, with secondary confirmation required for sensitive operations; and openness - not binding to specific vendors, and welcoming developers, platforms, and regulatory bodies to jointly participate in the evolution of standards.
Currently, Alipay is actively inviting e-commerce platforms, travel service providers, government systems, and AI application developers to join the ACT ecosystem, aiming to build a commercial trust network where "AI can handle tasks, users can trust them, and merchants are willing to connect." As large models move from "chatting" to "handling tasks," the ACT Protocol may be the key infrastructure to bridge the last mile of AI commercialization - making agents truly trusted digital collaborators rather than unknown variables in a black box.
