AI‑powered payments and ‘agentic’ payment systems refer to payment flows where autonomous or semi‑autonomous AI agents make decisions, orchestrate service calls, and execute transfers or settlement steps under programmable policies. As of 2025‑12‑10 this area is moving from research demos to applied stacks: startups such as Vanar and Oobit and a growing set of rivals are combining agent orchestration, retrieval‑augmented decisioning, and developer tooling to automate risk checks, routing, reconciliation and user workflows. Two complementary categories are shaping the space. Agent frameworks and runtimes (AutoGPT, AgentGPT) provide the autonomy primitives and orchestration for multi‑step payment flows, while agent marketplaces and platforms (Agentverse) let teams publish, discover and monitor reusable agents for compliance, AML screening, and routing. Developer‑first tools — LlamaIndex for building document agents and RAG pipelines, Warp as an Agentic Development Environment, and Windsurf (formerly Codeium) for agentic coding — reduce integration cost and improve observability when agents interact with payment gateways, ledgers or on‑chain services. Key trends making this timely: composable payments APIs, multi‑model stacks and RAG for policy/context, heightened regulatory scrutiny around automated fund movement, and enterprise demand for auditable, explainable agent decision trails. Practical deployments prioritize explicit human‑in‑the‑loop controls, cryptographic signing, robust monitoring and fallbacks to deterministic logic. The result is an ecosystem where marketplaces, IDEs and agent runtimes converge to enable programmable, policy‑aware payment automation — but also raise engineering and regulatory tradeoffs that teams must design for from day one.