Mastercard opens early access to its AI agent autonomous payment system.

Mastercard announced the early access launch of its AI agent payment system, Agent Pay for Machines, and demonstrated live transactions at the Cloudflare Connect conference. The system allows AI agents to autonomously discover services, negotiate transaction terms, and complete payments, all bounded by pre-set human-defined budget caps. Built on the open x402 protocol, when an AI agent accesses a paid service and receives a "402 Payment Required" response, it generates a digitally signed payment token, which is validated by the service provider to grant service access. These tokens can be settled in batches, enabling AI agents to complete multiple transactions rapidly. For the demonstration, a marketing agent planned an ad campaign for a protein bar product, processing 9 payments to two separate merchants under a single budget—no individual account registrations or separate invoice management were required. Coinbase provides wallet services, Base handles on-chain settlement, and BVNK supports fiat or stablecoin payments and settlements via Mastercard’s Global Money Platform. Mastercard will also offer developers buyer and seller APIs, SDKs, and test environments, and has rolled out end-to-end pilots with partners including Cloudflare, AWS, and Coinbase.