At Cloudflare Connect, Mastercard showcased Agent Pay for Machines, which lets AI agents pay for digital services on behalf of businesses within an approved budget. It builds on the open x402 protocol: when a service responds that payment is required, the agent creates a digitally signed payment voucher, the provider verifies it and settlement happens later. After pilots with Cloudflare, Ant International, Base, BVNK, Coinbase and others, the company opened an early access programme for developers.

What it means: AI agents increasingly need to buy small services: data, model calls, compute. Today that requires an account, an API key or prepaid credits with each provider, which does not scale when an agent picks services in the middle of a task. Mastercard is trying to combine the x402 protocol, so far linked mainly to stablecoins, with the card network and its trust controls. The central issue is not moving money but authority: who gave the agent the right to spend, how much and on what. The model of one approval and many small transactions, settled in batches, suits micropayments that would not be viable with ordinary card fees. For sellers of APIs and digital services, it could open new revenue from customers who would never sign up for a subscription. For companies using agents, budget limits and logging become a key cost-control tool. It is still unclear how liability will be shared when an agent buys something it should not have, a question regulators and networks will have to answer.

Read the original on Mastercard

Related service: myDATA integrations

Related stories