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When agents start spending: WeChat Pay's AI card and the rollout of Chinese agents

WeChat Pay's AI card now works with DeepSeek Harness and OpenClaw. Once a user authorizes it, the card handles the whole flow from recommendation to payment inside a conversation. WeChat stresses main-account isolation and per-order confirmation.

Rachel NwosuRachel NwosuAI, models and technology
AI & modelsAnalysisRachel NwosuPublished: 1 September 20265 min readSources 2
When agents start spending: WeChat Pay's AI card and the rollout of Chinese agents

Agents in China are moving from chatting to getting things done. On August 31, WeChat Pay announced an update to its AI card, adding support for DeepSeek Harness and OpenClaw after WorkBuddy and QClaw. Once a user authorizes the card, they only have to state what they need in the conversation. The agent then recommends, places the order and pays for it.

The AI card currently supports paid calls to more than 700 Pay Skills on Skillhub through DeepSeek Harness and OpenClaw, and more scenarios are planned. Activation is conversational too. You copy the install command to the agent, and it handles download, installation and configuration in one step. On the first payment, the agent generates a binding link.

The authorization design of the payment chain is the key part. Every order triggers a payment authorization that has to be confirmed a second time on the phone before the AI card is charged. Only then can the agent call the Pay Skill to finish the job. Tencent compares the card to the shopping money you hand someone running an errand: the user sets and manages the limit, and the card runs in a strong authorization mode.

On security, WeChat restated three boundaries. The AI card is fully separated from the main WeChat Pay account, and all spending inside an agent can only use the AI card balance. The user sets the limit and can adjust it at any time by transferring money in or out. And without the user's own final authorization, the AI cannot spend a single cent.

What matters about this kind of product is that it turns an agent from an adviser into a doer. For companies, an agent that can pay for skills is the one that actually plugs into business processes. DeepSeek also calls WorkBuddy (including CodeBuddy) and OpenCode official partners, saying they have fully integrated V4.1 Flash.

The limits of the rollout still need watching. Agents calling tools and payments on their own raise the bar for permission management, auditing and the division of responsibility. WeChat uses isolated accounts and per-order confirmation to contain the risk. That engineering choice may become a reference point for the commercialization of agents in China.

This model assumes agents can reliably call external tools and payment interfaces. That is exactly the scenario models like V4.1 Flash keep optimizing for in long context and cache cost.

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Sources

2
  1. 01微信支付 AI 专属卡支持接入 DeepSeek Harness 和 OpenClawZH
  2. 02DeepSeek V4.1 Flash：官方合作伙伴ZH

All figures and quotations in this text come from the sources listed below.

Content prepared by the editorial team with AI assistance.

Rachel Nwosu

Rachel Nwosu

AI, models and technology

Rachel Nwosu covers AI, models and technology for FLASH24, working from public model documentation, benchmark releases and repository histories rather than press summaries, and she skips announcements that arrive without reproducible numbers. She checks training-data claims against dataset cards and reruns reported metrics where code is available. She spends much of her week interviewing researchers and engineers, tracking model launch calendars, and comparing vendor benchmarks with independent evaluations. Outside the desk she runs 3D printers, restores old computers, and tests how models learn from internet junk. She does not publish benchmark figures she cannot trace to a source.

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