Mastercard Enables AI Agents to Pay Each Other

Mastercard has launched a service that enables a new class of payments by allowing artificial intelligence agents to complete transactions among themselves.

The new Agent Pay for Machines builds on Mastercard’s Agent Pay program by adding capabilities for high-frequency, low-latency, low-value payments executed by agents and machines, the company said in a Wednesday (June 10) press release.

This infrastructure can handle payments that are continuous, embedded, permissioned and executed at machine speed, and it can support credentialing, controls and guaranteed settlement across cards, stablecoins and other payment types, according to the release.

Its capabilities could be used, for example, by a merchant’s AI agent to launch a store’s web presence by buying a domain name, a hosting service, images and checkout pages, per the release.

“Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models,” Mastercard Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said in the release. “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.”

Mastercard is collaborating with more than 30 initial partners to scale an open ecosystem for Agent Pay forMachines by validating priority use cases, establishing common rules and accelerating adoption across industries, per the release.

Karan Katyal, head of agentic commerce at Adyen, which is one of the initial partners, said in the release that infrastructure decisions made now will determine how the machine-to-machine payments space develops.

“Building these foundations with partners like Mastercard, openly and with merchant outcomes at the center, is how we ensure this next era of commerce works for everyone in the ecosystem,” Katyal said.

Mastercard’s launch of Agent Pay for Machines follows the company’s April 2025 introduction of Agent Pay. The company said at the time that Agent Pay is an agentic AI-driven payments program designed to help unlock an agentic commerce future by, for example, integrating payments experiences into generative AI-powered conversational platforms.

In March, Mastercard introduced Verifiable Intent, an open-source, standards-based framework designed for agentic commerce. The company said Verifiable Intent is designed to link a consumer’s identity, their specific instructions and the outcome of a transaction into a single, tamper-resistant record, creating a cryptographic audit trail that all parties can consult if a dispute arises.