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 so that AI agents can 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 the Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new service that will allow these transactions to be authorised, orchestrated, and settled at machine speed across its global payment network.
“The ‘Agent Pay for Machines’ will create the conditions for an explosion of AI business models,” stated Jorn Lambert, Chief Product Officer at Mastercard. “Machine-to-machine payments can enable the buying and selling of services between agents on 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 user-initiated, these transactions are programmatic, always active, and executed between systems behind the scenes of digital commerce. The 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 enable secure and reliable payments as the software can perform transactions autonomously.
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 customised transactions for their users. An entrepreneur opening a flower shop could instruct an AI agent to build and launch the store’s online presence, purchasing a domain name, a hosting service, images, and checkout pages within a defined budget, transforming a single request initiated by a human into a chain of transactions automatically executed between providers.
In another example, a logistics agent managing a delivery route could pay for shipping, book access to the unloading platform, purchase temporary tracking data for the chain, and settle handling fees at the warehouse automatically as a shipment moves from origin to destination.
Payments are not just increasing. They are changing shape. They become continuous, embedded, authorised, 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 the assurance 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 has been designed to meet these needs.
The service is built on the Mastercard Agent Pay program, 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, machine-driven transactions that happen continuously in the background of digital commerce.
This is where the Mastercard 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 organisations 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 core capabilities:
· Credentialing: Each agent is credentialed and, with Verifiable Intent, can be recognised and transact confidently across ecosystems.
· Authorisation: Organisations can set authorisation rules and spending limits that are applied programmatically, ensuring that transactions remain within the defined parameters.
· Transaction: Verified participants can connect and transact between providers and systems, enabling continuous automated and high-frequency commerce.
· Settlement: Supports reliable and guaranteed 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 industries. 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 that companies can adopt new technologies without compromising the security, reliability, and reach they expect from Mastercard’s global network. Alongside Agent Pay and Verifiable Intent, the Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines reflects Mastercard’s ongoing investment in building an open and reliable 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 drive agent-based commerce with Agent Pay, involving the participation of 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 total security. The operations have involved real purchases across different segments, reinforcing the role of the Brazilian market as a leader in adopting innovative payment solutions and solidifying the region as fertile ground for the advancement of AI-driven commerce.
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