Shares of JD.com Inc - SW (09618) have risen more than 3% in Hong Kong trading. At the time of writing, the stock was up 2.57% to HK$111.7, with a turnover of HK$692 million.

The move follows the company's official launch on June 11 of its Agent Autonomous Payment Protocol, referred to as the JD A2P2 protocol. This marks China's first protocol specifically designed for autonomous payments by AI agents, aiming to allow users to spend money with ease and confidence through AI, with every transaction being traceable and verifiable.

This development signifies that AI agents are no longer limited to merely adding items to a shopping cart and waiting for manual user confirmation. Instead, they are now endowed with the capability to autonomously complete payments under a set of defined rules.

Protocol Details and Autonomy Levels

The JD A2P2 protocol systematically categorizes the autonomy of AI agent payments into six levels, from L0 to L5, providing a clear evolutionary path for different application scenarios. Level L0 represents complete human confirmation for every payment, while L5 signifies fully autonomous payment by the AI agent.

The protocol's current focus is primarily on the intermediate L3 and L4 levels. At L3, an AI agent can autonomously initiate a payment request within a single task, with the system deciding whether to approve it based on user-defined boundaries. Level L4 grants the agent greater authority, allowing it to complete payments autonomously as long as key parameters such as amount, context, and user are within pre-set limits.