Mastercard prepares for a future where AI agents make payments

Mastercard (MA) is betting that AI agents will soon become active participants in the economy and wants its payments network to sit at the center of that shift.

The payments giant on Tuesday unveiled Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a service enabling AI agents and software systems to make payments to each other securely and at scale. The platform supports automated transactions across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins, while providing identity verification, spending controls and guaranteed settlement through Mastercard's network.

The service comes as companies across technology, payments and crypto race to build infrastructure for what many are calling agentic commerce, where AI systems complete tasks, purchase services and coordinate transactions on behalf of users. Agents could be involved in trillions of dollars worth of transactions by the end of the decade, according to some estimates.

"We are already seeing a number of services and agents popping up to provide a range of products and services," Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard's executive vice president of blockchain and digital asset products and partnerships, told CoinDesk. Those services range from booking travel and building websites to creating artwork and completing other digital tasks.

Dhamodharan said the next challenge is creating trust between those systems.

Businesses and consumers need confidence that agents are interacting with legitimate counterparties and operating within authorized spending limits. Service providers, meanwhile, need assurance that they will be paid.

"These are problems that we've solved before in the B2B world and the carded world for decades," Dhamodharan said. "We're bringing the same level of trust and ability to find the right set of agents, ability to convey that you're actually going to complete the payment and to make sure that people can get paid."

The platform is designed to address those concerns through credentialing, permissioning and settlement services. The company said the system can authenticate agents, enforce spending rules and settle payments across multiple payment methods, including stablecoins.

More than 30 companies have joined the initiative, including Coinbase (COIN), Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, RippleX, Polygon Labs, Solana Foundation and OKX. Mastercard said permissions and credentials associated with AI agents will initially be recorded on the Polygon, Solana and Base blockchains.

Although large-scale machine-to-machine commerce remains nascent, Dhamodharan said Mastercard is already seeing signs of demand. He pointed to increasing activity around HTTP 402, an emerging internet payment standard, where automated transactions often fail because no payment method is available.

"There are already transactions happening," he said. "There are already many declines happening because there is no payment option available. That is a leading indicator in our view."

Mastercard said it plans to expand access to Agent Pay for Machines later this year.