The emergence of AI has created new ways to buy and sell goods and services. It is now demanding a new class of payments. Mastercard envisions a future where companies create services so that AI agents can make purchases. Operating at machine speed, these agents could continuously transact with each other 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 pennies, that can be completed quickly, programmatically, and securely. The company introduces the 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 among agents at fundamentally different scales than current payments — very high volumes, very low amounts, with great speed and extremely low latency.”
Unlike traditional payments at points of sale or between people and merchants, which are discrete and user-initiated, these transactions are programmatic, always on, and executed between systems in the background 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 execute transactions.
Building a new class of payments
AI agents are no longer just assisting in decisions. They are capable of acting according to human intent, coordinating services, and completing custom transactions for their users. An entrepreneur opening a flower shop could instruct an AI agent to build and launch the store’s web presence by purchasing a domain name, hosting service, images, and checkout pages within a defined budget, turning a single human-initiated request into a chain of transactions automatically executed among providers.
In another example, a logistics agent managing a delivery route could pay for shipping, reserve access to the loading platform, purchase temporary tracking data, and settle warehouse handling fees automatically as a shipment moves from origin to destination.
Payments are not just increasing. They are transforming. 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 guarantees that they will receive payment. Agents need transactions to move instantaneously, with each transaction completed securely and as expected. The Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines is designed to meet these needs.
The service builds on the Agent Pay program from Mastercard, introduced in 2025, providing a system to scale high-frequency, low-latency, low-value payments executed 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.
It is here that 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, allowing 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 reliable system for machine-driven transactions through a set of core capabilities:
· Credentialing: Each agent is credentialed and, with Verifiable Intent, can be recognized and transact with confidence across ecosystems.
· Authorization: Organizations can set authorization rules and spending limits that are applied programmatically, ensuring that transactions remain within specified parameters.
· Transaction: Verified participants can connect and transact among providers and systems, enabling continuous high-frequency automated commerce.
· Settlement: Supports reliable and guaranteed multichannel settlement among 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. Together 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, driven by agents and powered by machines.
Brazil brings innovation with local partners in Agent Pay
In Brazil, Mastercard has been strengthening strategic partnerships to boost agent-led commerce with Agent Pay, involving 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 complete security. The operations involved real purchases in various segments, reinforcing Brazil’s market role as a leader in adopting innovative payment solutions and consolidating the region as fertile ground for advancing AI-driven commerce.
To learn more about the Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines, visit Link.
