Arcade.dev, a unified agent action platform that makes AI agents production-ready, and Lithic, a card processing platform, are partnering to develop an AI e-commerce application capable of making secure, authenticated payments. The partnership will launch shopping agents that can search, compare products, and check out in one process.
To make fully agentic commerce a reality, Lithic and Arcade introduced “just-in-time auth” for agentic payments, which ensures agents can only access the exact payment permissions they need precisely when they need them. To complete a purchase, at checkout, the application creates a single-use credit card bound to the exact merchant and price of the user’s cart. The technology is intended to be open-source, so that any developer can build an agent with these capabilities. This approach unlocks one of the last major hurdles to secure and simple AI-powered commerce: the ability for agents to simply and securely check out.
“The shift to AI-native commerce will be a multi-trillion dollar transformation, and, until now, payments have not existed within the AI ecosystem,” said Lithic co-founder and CEO Bo Jiang. “Partnering with Arcade allows us to create the first truly secure payment rails for AI agents, enabling highly trustworthy AI-driven commerce for Lithic clients.”
AI is reshaping how consumers discover and evaluate products online, from personalized search results to intelligent product recommendations. Large language models help millions of users research purchases and compare options, but consumers are still unable to complete transactions in an AI-native environment. This partnership aims to eliminate this friction and deliver comprehensive AI-powered commerce by enabling AI agents to securely complete purchases on behalf of users.
“Security is the foundation of any reliable agent capable of taking real action,” said Arcade.dev co-founder and CEO Alex Salazar. “Arcade is making reliable agentic transactions possible. We’re building a future where consumers don’t think twice about an agent making a purchase for them.”
