AI Agents Can Now Make Payments Autonomously as Mastercard Opens Early Access to Agent Pay for Machines

Odaily reports: Mastercard has announced early access to its AI agent payment system, Agent Pay for Machines, and demonstrated actual transactions at the Cloudflare Connect conference. Built on the open protocol x402, the system allows AI agents to autonomously discover services, negotiate transaction terms, and complete payments, while operating under human-preset budget caps. When an agent accesses a paid service and receives a "402 Payment Required" response, it generates a digitally signed payment credential, which the service provider verifies before delivering the service; the credentials can be settled in batches. In the demonstration, a marketing agent completed 9 payments to two independent merchants under a single budget, without needing to register separate accounts or handle separate invoices. Coinbase provides wallet services, Base handles on-chain settlement, and BVNK supports fiat or stablecoin payments and settlement through Mastercard's Global Money Platform. Mastercard will also provide developers with buyer and seller APIs, SDKs, and a testing environment, and has already conducted end-to-end pilots with Cloudflare, AWS, Coinbase, and other organizations.