Mastercard Opens Early Access to AI Agent Payments

Mastercard opened early developer access to Agent Pay for Machines on October 20, demonstrating an AI agent making payments to digital-service providers within a budget approved in advance by a human. The system remains in pilot and is not commercially available, the company said. At Cloudflare Connect, an agent working for marketing agency Hype planned a promotional campaign and made nine payments to two providers: AIsa, for social media research, and Cloudflare AI Gateway, for eight campaign images. The payments came from one approved budget. The demonstration showed the agent completing the purchases without separate accounts or invoices with the providers. The payment flow uses the x402 protocol, which draws on the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” response. When a service requests payment, the agent generates a digitally signed voucher within its authorized spending limit. The provider verifies the voucher before delivering the service. Mastercard says providers can batch vouchers and redeem them later. In the demonstration, Coinbase Developer Platform supplied wallet infrastructure, Base handled on-chain settlement, and BVNK served as the agent wallet. Mastercard acquired BVNK...