Visa has unveiled Visa CLI, the first product out of its newly branded Visa Crypto Labs division, targeting the emerging market for AI agent payments. The tool is currently in closed beta, with access available by request through GitHub authentication.

The product positions Visa's payments infrastructure as a native layer for "command line commerce" — a term Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto, has used to describe a new era in which AI agents transact autonomously rather than humans navigating web interfaces. The CLI tool is designed to let agents pay for external API calls on demand, removing the need for pre-configured accounts or credentials.

Initial use cases listed on the product page include image-generation APIs, music-generation endpoints, and proprietary data feeds, such as market data and research databases, locked behind paywalls.

The launch arrives as incumbent payment networks converge on agentic commerce from multiple angles. Stripe's Tempo blockchain launched its mainnet today, simultaneously unveiling the Machine Payments Protocol, an open standard for agent-to-service micropayments that lets agents authorize a spending limit upfront and stream payments continuously.

Mastercard last week unveiled Verifiable Intent, an open trust framework co-developed with Google that creates a cryptographic record of what a user authorized when an AI agent acts on their behalf.

Meanwhile, Circle launched Nanopayments on testnet last week, built on the x402 standard, designed for sub-cent, gas-free USDC transactions for AI agents paying for pay-per-call APIs without accounts or credentials.

The competing approaches reveal a fault line emerging in how the industry envisions settling agent payments. Traditional finance players are building trust layers on top of existing payment rails, while crypto proponents argue blockchain infrastructure is better suited to a world where AI agents are first-class economic actors — a point underscored by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who noted that AI agents can own crypto wallets but cannot open bank accounts.

Visa CLI straddles that divide: card network rails with a developer-native, command-line interface designed for the same autonomous agent use cases crypto protocols are targeting.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.

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