Mastercard Opens Early Access to AI Agent Autonomous Payment System

BlockBeats news, October 21 - Mastercard announced the opening of early access to its AI agent payment system Agent Pay for Machines and demonstrated actual transactions at the Cloudflare Connect conference. The system allows AI agents to autonomously discover services, negotiate transaction terms, and complete payments, while being constrained by human-preset budget caps.

The system is built on the open protocol x402. When an AI agent accesses a service that requires payment and receives a "402 Payment Required" response, it generates a digitally signed payment credential, which the service provider verifies before delivering the service. The relevant credentials can be redeemed in batches to support AI agents in quickly completing multiple transactions.

In the demonstration, a marketing agent planned an advertising campaign for a protein bar product and completed 9 payments to two independent merchants under a single budget, without the need to separately register accounts or handle individual bills. Coinbase provides wallet services, Base handles on-chain settlement, and BVNK supports fiat or stablecoin payments and settlement through Mastercard's Global Money Platform.

Mastercard will also provide developers with buyer and seller APIs, SDKs, and a testing environment, and has already conducted end-to-end pilots with institutions such as Cloudflare, AWS, and Coinbase.