Mastercard opens early access to Agent Pay for Machines for AI agent payments

Mastercard has opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines, which lets an AI agent pay for digital services such as data, AI models and computing power within a budget and permissions a business sets. It builds on x402, an open protocol in which a service replies "402 Payment Required"; the agent then signs a payment voucher within its limit, and providers can combine vouchers and redeem them later. In a pilot demo shown at Cloudflare Connect with the marketing agency Hype, an agent planning a sample campaign made nine payments to two providers, AIsa for social media research and Cloudflare for eight campaign images, under one approved budget and without separate accounts or API keys. Mastercard says it ran end-to-end pilots with Cloudflare, Ant International, AIsa, Base, BVNK, Coinbase and Hype, and early access includes APIs, a toolkit, a sandbox and documentation.