Mastercard has begun giving developers early access to its Agent Pay for Machines system after completing end-to-end pilots with Cloudflare, Ant International, BVNK, AIsa, Base and Coinbase.
The company is inviting developers to test the system’s APIs and suggest additional features. Agent Pay for Machines remains in pilot and is not yet commercially available.
Mastercard announced the project in June, describing a system that supports spending controls as well as payments made by card, bank account and stablecoin.
The technology was demonstrated at Cloudflare Connect, where marketing agency Hype gave an artificial intelligence agent a sample task linked to the launch of a protein bar.
The agent was asked to purchase social media research from AIsa and obtain eight campaign images through Cloudflare AI Gateway. It had to complete the work within a budget approved by Hype and made nine payments to the two providers.
How the payments were processed
The agent used the x402 protocol, incubated by Coinbase, to pay for the services. The standard takes its name from HTTP 402, the “Payment Required” status code.
x402 enables websites, APIs and AI agents to request and receive payments using blockchain-based and traditional payment rails.
When a merchant requested payment during the pilot, it sent back an HTTP 402 response. The merchant then checked the agent’s signed payment voucher before providing the requested service.
Mastercard said multiple payment vouchers could be grouped together and redeemed later, avoiding the need to settle every transaction separately.
Coinbase Developer Platform provided the wallet infrastructure that funded the agent in the Hype demonstration, while Base served as the onchain settlement network.
BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider acquired by Mastercard in August, acted as the agent wallet. It used Mastercard’s Global Money Platform to handle payments and settlement in either fiat currency or stablecoins.
Under the system, sellers can receive funds in their preferred currency, token or payment rail.
“The web gave software a way to communicate. APIs gave software a way to use services. Now AI agents need a way to pay for them,” Mastercard said in a statement shared with The Block. “That’s what we’re building.”
