On October 15, Time magazine unveiled its 2026 Best Inventions list, featuring Alipay AI Payment and Ant Aifu, a health AI app from Ant Group. Alipay AI Payment is the only payment service on the list, with over 100 million users and 300 million transactions; Ant Aifu is the only Chinese AI app selected this year.
Ant Group CEO Han Xinyi said AI payments are not the final step but the trusted commitment engine for agent commerce. Alipay announced its AI payments are moving from 'payable' to 'trustworthy,' introducing an AI wallet agent, Vibe Pay, Skill Pay and Machine Pay, along with new scenarios such as AI recurring purchases, and applying the APASS trust infrastructure.