The new offering builds on x402, an open protocol that allows digital services to request payment online, and “connects it with the trust, security and reach of the Mastercard network,” the company said in a new release provided to PYMNTS Tuesday (Oct. 20).
“AI agents are becoming more capable, reliable and able to work with one another. Increasingly, they also need to pay for things,” the release said. “But how does an agent actually pay?”
Paid digital services normally require an account, API key, prepaid credits or billing relationship with a provider, Mastercard said.
“That’s fine if an agent is using one or two services, but grows more complicated when the agent needs to pick between different services as a task unfolds, paying only for what it uses along the way,” the company added.
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“Then there’s trust. Who gave the agent permission to spend? How much can it spend? What can it spend that money on? And who is it paying?”
Mastercard says Agent Pay for Machines addresses these questions, with the company planning to showcase its abilities at the Cloudflare Connect event this week.
“At Cloudflare Connect, we’re bringing this to life with Hype, a marketing agency launching a protein bar campaign,” the release said.
In this scenario, Hype presents an AI agent with a task and defied budget, and the agent uses the Agent Pay for Machines Discovery Service to find providers and come up with a plan for Hype to approve, letting the agent get to work, a process covering nine payments, two independent merchants and one budget, but no separate accounts, API keys or invoices.
“The agent paid only for what it used, while Hype stayed in control,” Mastercard said.
PYMNTS spoke last month with Mastercard U.S. Co-President Chiro Aikat about the company’s work with merchants on applying standards for agent-initiated transactions while still keeping the consumer in charge of the decision.
The large question is how those capabilities become ordinary enough for shoppers to use without having to think about the machinery underpinning them.
“Everything in payments that has been successful has been based on experience, ease of use, and more importantly, trust,” Aikat told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster.
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