Today, Mastercard is introducing Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new service that will allow transactions to be permissioned, orchestrated and settled at machine speed across its global payments network.

“Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer. “Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today — very high volumes, very small values, very fast and at extremely low latency.”

Unlike traditional point-of-sale or person-to-merchant payments, 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 enable secure, reliable payments as software begins to transact on its own.

The service builds on Mastercard’s Agent Pay program, introduced in 2025, by providing a system to scale high-frequency, low-latency, low-value payments executed by agents and machines. Where 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 happen continuously in the background of digital commerce.

This is where Mastercard’s global network plays a critical role. 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 requires.

Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines establishes a trusted system for machine-driven transactions through a set of foundational capabilities:

• Credentialing: Every agent is credentialed, and with Verifiable Intent, can be recognized and transact with trust across ecosystems.
• Permissioning: Organizations can set authorization rules and spending limits that are programmatically enforced, ensuring transactions stay within defined parameters.
• Transacting: Verified participants can connect and transact across providers and systems, enabling continuous, high-frequency automated commerce.
• Settling: Supports reliable, guaranteed multi-rail settlement across cards, accounts and stablecoins.

Transactions move predictably, improving transparency and consistency.

Mastercard is collaborating with a broad set of 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 by Santander, Global Payments, Lovable Labs Incorporated, Mastercard Merchant Cloud, MoonPay, Nevermined, OKX, PayOS, Polygon, Rain, Ripple, Sapiom, Skyfire, Solana Foundation, Stripe, t54 Labs, Tempo, Turnkey and Utila.