More than 30 partners, including Stripe, Coinbase, Ripple and Cloudflare, back the new infrastructure for AI agents transacting with each other continuously and automatically
Mastercard has introduced Agent Pay for Machines, a new payments service designed for transactions executed by AI agents acting on each other’s behalf, often at fractions of a cent and at machine speed.
The service targets a fundamentally different category of payment to traditional card transactions. Rather than a person initiating a purchase, AP4M enables continuous, programmatic, background transactions between systems, for instance an AI agent automatically buying a domain name, hosting and checkout pages within a budget to launch a business’s online presence, or a logistics agent paying for freight, warehouse access and cold-chain monitoring as a shipment moves through a supply chain.
“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.”
The system rests on four capabilities. Every agent is credentialed and recognisable across ecosystems through what Mastercard calls Verifiable Intent. Organisations set programmatically enforced spending limits and authorisation rules. Verified participants can transact across providers continuously. Settlement is guaranteed across multiple rails, including cards, bank accounts and stablecoins.
AP4M builds on Agent Pay, which Mastercard introduced in 2025 to govern how trusted AI agents participate in payments generally. AP4M addresses a narrower but higher-volume use case: the automated, micro-value transactions happening continuously in the background of digital commerce, between machines rather than initiated by a person.
Mastercard is launching the service with a broad coalition of payments and crypto infrastructure firms, including Adyen, Stripe, Coinbase, Checkout.com, Ripple, Cloudflare, OKX, Ant International and Global Payments, among more than 30 named partners. The involvement of stablecoin and blockchain infrastructure providers alongside traditional card processors signals that Mastercard expects machine-to-machine payments to move across both conventional rails and digital asset rails, depending on what each transaction requires.
For banks and payment providers, AP4M represents an early attempt to define the rules and infrastructure for an entirely new payments category, one where the volume of transactions could dramatically exceed anything seen in human-initiated commerce, even as the value per transaction shrinks toward near-zero.