The emergence of AI has created new ways to buy and sell goods and services. Now, it is demanding a new class of payments. Mastercard envisions a future where companies create services for AI agents to make purchases. Operating at machine speed, these agents could transact with each other continuously at high speed, executing chains of transactions, including microtransactions. This shift could unleash a new massive wave of innovation, business models, and economic activity, where any company, from individual entrepreneurs to the largest corporations, can become a virtual powerhouse.
To enable this new form of commerce, Mastercard has developed a new way to pay for these services: payments, even if they are just cents, to be completed quickly, programmatically, and securely. The company introduces Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new service that will allow these transactions to be authorized, orchestrated, and settled at machine speed on its global payments network.
“Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for an explosion of AI business models,” said Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer at Mastercard. “Payments between machines can enable the buying and selling of services between agents at fundamentally different scales than current payments — very high volumes, very low values, with great speed and extremely low latency.”
Unlike traditional payments at points of sale or between people and merchants, which are one-off and initiated by the user, these transactions are programmatic, always active, and executed between systems behind the scenes of digital commerce. Agent Pay for Machines allows Mastercard network participants to bring the trust and controls of the company’s global network to machine-driven commerce, helping AI innovators facilitate secure and reliable payments as software can autonomously carry out transactions.
Building a new class of payments
AI agents are no longer just assisting in decisions. They can act according to human intent, coordinate services, and complete customized transactions for their users. An entrepreneur opening a florist could instruct an AI agent to build and launch the store’s web presence, purchasing a domain name, hosting service, images, and checkout pages within a defined budget, transforming a single request initiated by a human into a chain of transactions executed automatically among providers.
In another example, a logistics agent managing a delivery route could pay for freight, reserve access to the loading platform, purchase temporary monitoring data for the chain, and settle warehouse handling fees automatically as a shipment moves from origin to destination.
Payments are not just increasing. They are changing form. They become continuous, embedded, authorized, and executed at machine speed. This creates a new requirement: an infrastructure capable of keeping pace with this movement.
In this new environment, businesses seek the peace of mind of knowing they will receive payment. Agents need transactions to move instantly, with each transaction completed safely and as expected. The Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines has been designed to meet these needs.
The service is based on the Mastercard Agent Pay program, introduced in 2025, providing a system to scale high-frequency, low-latency, low-value payments made by agents and machines. While Agent Pay defines how trusted AI agents participate in payments, Agent Pay for Machines is designed for a complementary opportunity: automated, micro, and machine-driven transactions that occur continuously in the background of digital commerce.
This is where Mastercard’s global network plays a critical role. The Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines supports credentialing, controls, and guaranteed settlement across multiple payment types, from cards to stablecoins, enabling organizations to deploy automated payments with the interoperability, reliability, and governance that the digital economy demands.
How it works
The Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines establishes a trusted system for machine-driven transactions through a set of foundational capabilities:
· Credentialing: Each agent is credentialed and, with Verifiable Intent, can be recognized and transact confidently across ecosystems.
· Authorization: Organizations can set authorization rules and spending limits that are applied programmatically, ensuring transactions stay within defined parameters.
· Transaction: Verified participants can connect and transact between providers and systems, enabling continuous high-frequency automated commerce.
· Settlement: Supports reliable multi-rail settlement across cards, accounts, and stablecoins.
Transactions occur predictably, enhancing transparency and consistency.
Partnering to scale an open ecosystem
Mastercard is collaborating with many partners to validate priority use cases, establish common rules, and accelerate adoption across sectors. Initial participants and supporters include: Aave Labs, Adyen, Alchemy, Anchorage Digital, Ant International, Basis Theory, BVNK, Catena, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Coinflow, Crossmint, Getnet from Santander, Global Payments, Lovable, Mastercard Merchant Cloud, MoonPay, Nevermined, OKX, PayOS, Polygon, Rain, Ripple, Sapiom, Skyfire, Solana Foundation, Stripe, t54 Labs, Tempo, Turnkey, and Utila.
Supporting the next phase of digital commerce
The Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines expands Mastercard’s efforts to enable trusted digital interactions, from identity and authentication to reliable data exchange, so businesses can adopt new technologies without compromising the security, reliability, and reach they expect from Mastercard’s global network. Along with Agent Pay and Verifiable Intent, the Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines reflects Mastercard’s ongoing investment in building an open and trusted infrastructure for autonomous payments, agent-driven, and machine-driven.
Brazil brings innovation with local partners on Agent Pay
In Brazil, Mastercard has been strengthening strategic partnerships to drive agent commerce with Agent Pay, partnering with local issuers and processors such as Itaú and Santander. These institutions have already conducted live transactions using Mastercard’s infrastructure, demonstrating the viability of AI agent-initiated payments at scale and with full security. The operations involved real purchases across different segments, reinforcing the role of the Brazilian market as a protagonist in the adoption of innovative payment solutions and establishing the region as fertile ground for advancing AI-driven commerce.
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