Mastercard Launches Agent Pay for Machines for Automated AI Agent Payments With Coinbase, Stripe, Adyen

Agent Pay for Machines

Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) to let AI agents and software systems conduct automated transactions at machine speed across Mastercard’s global payments network, including payments executed in the background of digital commerce. The company said AP4M is designed for machine-to-machine transactions and microtransactions worth fractions of a cent, with capabilities including credentialing, permission controls, automated transacting, and multi-rail settlement across fiat and stablecoins. Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said, “Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models,” framing the platform as enabling services to be bought and sold among agents at “very high volumes, very small values, very fast and at extremely low latency.”

In a related statement, Mastercard said the system supports automated payments across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins while providing identity verification, spending controls and guaranteed settlement through Mastercard’s network. Mastercard also said it is working with more than 30 initial partners, including Coinbase, Stripe and Adyen, to build trusted payment systems for agentic commerce.

Reporting for this sectionCryptonews.netCoinDesk

Trust, permissions, blockchains

Mastercard said AP4M aims to bring trust and control to agentic commerce by authenticating AI agents, enforcing spending limits and guaranteeing settlement through Mastercard’s network. Fortune reported that Mastercard’s protocol stores permissions that humans grant their AI agents onto a blockchain so multiple parties can verify whether an agent is acting as instructed, and it said Mastercard initially chose to log those permissions onto Polygon, Solana, and Base. CoinDesk added that Mastercard’s permissions and credentials associated with AI agents will initially be recorded on the Polygon, Solana and Base blockchains, with broader access planned later this year.

CoinDesk quoted Raj Dhamodharan saying, “These are problems that we've solved before in the B2B world and the carded world for decades,” as he described Mastercard’s approach to trust between systems. In the same CoinDesk account, Dhamodharan said the next challenge is creating trust between those systems, with businesses and consumers needing confidence that agents are interacting with legitimate counterparties and operating within authorized spending limits.

Reporting for this sectionFortune@coindesk

Partners and next steps

Mastercard’s AP4M launch drew participation from payments and crypto firms, with the company listing more than 30 partners including Coinbase, OKX, Polygon, RippleX, Aave Labs, Anchorage Digital, BVNK, MoonPay, Stripe, Cloudflare, and the Solana Foundation.

PYMNTS described AP4M as infrastructure for continuous, embedded, permissioned payments executed at machine speed, and it said the system can support credentialing, controls and guaranteed settlement across cards, stablecoins and other payment types.

PYMNTS also tied the platform to practical use cases, saying a merchant’s AI agent could buy a domain name, a hosting service, images and checkout pages, per the release.

In the Cryptonews.net account, Mastercard said the platform is built to support a future in which AI agents transact directly with one another, enabling always-on commerce and high-volume microtransactions.

Mastercard said it plans to expand access to Agent Pay for Machines later this year, while Fortune reported Jorn Lambert telling readers, “Do I think it’ll be a meaningful new addressable market for us over the next five years? I think so.”

Reporting for this sectionDecryptPYMNTS