Visa Crypto Labs — a newly branded internal division at Visa — has released Visa CLI in closed beta, a command-line tool designed to let AI agents and automated scripts make card payments directly from a terminal without managing API keys or requiring human sign-off.

What It Does

The tool embeds programmatic payment capability into scripts and developer pipelines, targeting the emerging market for machine-to-machine commerce. Instead of pre-configuring accounts and storing credentials, agents can call a payment endpoint on-demand via typed commands. Initial use cases listed on the product page include paying for image-generation APIs, music-generation services, and paywalled market data feeds.

Cuy Sheffield, Visa's head of crypto, framed it as "command-line commerce" — a model where software transacts autonomously rather than routing through human-facing checkout flows.

Part of a Broader Race

The launch lands the same week as Tempo's mainnet — the Stripe-backed Layer 1 that simultaneously unveiled the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) for agent-to-service micropayments. Visa contributed specifications to the MPP allowing card-based settlements on its network. The Visa CLI is a separate, standalone product built on top of that same rails work.

Mastercard and Circle have also shipped related tools recently: Mastercard's Verifiable Intent framework and Circle's x402-based Nanopayments testnet both target the same agent payment use case from different angles.

Status

Visa CLI is currently in closed beta, with access available by request via GitHub authentication at visacli.sh. No launch timeline for general availability has been announced.