Ant International, a leading global digital payment, digitisation, and financial technology provider, today officially launched AI SHIELD to protect AI systems from threats and vulnerabilities, a proactive toolkit to help AI-powered financial services stay secure and compliant as AI rapidly transforms global finance.
Ensuring security is at the core of Ant International’s AI strategy, which also prioritises providing domain excellence in FinAI and extending AI services via an AI-as-a-Service platform. AI is integrated across every stage of payment processing at Ant International. In 2024, the company processed more than US$1 trillion of global transactions, all supported by AI.
AI SHIELD uses AI Security Docker to address the unreliability inherent in AI services, including bias, security vulnerabilities, and ethical concerns. The increase in AI-caused incidents leads to an annual potential cost of US$57 billion, according to European Journal of Futures Research. While up to 90% of organisations are actively implementing LLM tools in their processes, only 5% have high confidence in their AI security preparedness.
Anchoring reliable AI on the AI security docker
AI Security Docker aims to make sure that AI — when used for things like fraud detection, payment authorization, and chatbots — operates safely, reliably, and in compliance with regulations. It provides end-to-end protection from development to deployment of AI models and agents to reduce AI service risks.
A common AI service risk is over-delegation, which undermines the reliability of using agents to facilitate payments. While using agents to process payments offer new levels of automation and efficiency in financial services, current agent applications face several major risks when relying on LLMs. Without robust security controls, agent-delegated services could be misused or perform unauthorized, unsafe operations.
Ant International’s AI Security Docker can reduce AI service risks by 90% through the following three key processes:
- Agent Trustworthiness Authentication – Rigorous security evaluation and risk discovery for AI agents before going live on Ant International’s AI-as-a-Service platform Alipay+ GenAI Cockpit.
- AI Service Safeguard – Continuous real-time monitoring and intervention on agent interactions to block emerging threats using multilayer intent recognition.
- Dynamic Patrolling & AI Red Teaming – Ongoing inspection and adversarial testing, ensuring rapid resolution and reinforcement against vulnerabilities.
Full-cycle protection of financial transactions
Ant International alongside its partners serve over 100 million merchants and 1.8 billion user accounts worldwide. These services include global wallet gateway Alipay+, merchant payment services Antom, embedded finance and credit tech services Bettr and global account services WorldFirst.
AI-powered risk-management solutions secured by AI SHIELD provides full-lifecycle protection of transactions at Ant International. These solutions protect businesses and users from deepfake attacks, frauds and scams. For instance, account protection solution Alipay+ EasySafePay 360, launched in September 2025, can reduce account takeover incidence for digital wallet payments by 90%.
Stronger trust and security through cross-sector partnerships
Ant International has shared its trusted AI capabilities with the broader community through collaborations such as the Digital Wallet Guardian Partnership. Ant International, AlipayHK, Hong Kong’s most-used e-wallet, and TNG eWallet, Malaysia’s most preferred e-wallet, have initiated the partnership to further strengthen the protection of global wallet payments.
“Trusted AI could be a defining factor in unlocking the full potential of artificial intelligence in financial services. At Ant International, we are committed to working with industry partners to evolve the most advanced risk management framework for AI, while harnessing AI itself to strengthen our risk management capabilities. We believe a two-pronged approach is essential for driving responsible growth of FinAI,” said Tianyi Zhang, general manager of risk management and cybersecurity at Ant International.
Ant International is also leading efforts to develop clear security protocols for AI agents with industry leaders such as Google, through its role as a launch partner of Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open rulebook that defines how AI agents can reliably transact with the authorisation of users. Other critical AI capabilities that Ant International has delivered to c
