Exclusive: Mastercard launches protocol to let AI agents pay each other, send micropayments

Agent Pay for Machines is one of a slew of recent attempts from big companies to build payment networks optimized for AI.

Mastercard is diving deeper into AI payments. The card giant announced on Wednesday that it was launching a protocol to let AI actors more easily pay each other. Called Agent Pay for Machines, the new network is meant to make smaller money transfers easier when, for example, an AI agent wants to access data piecemeal from a website.

To ensure that bots act as instructed, Mastercard’s new protocol stores permissions that humans grant their AI agents onto a blockchain. As opposed to a private database, this information is accessible to multiple parties that want to verify whether an agent is acting as instructed. Initially, Mastercard chose to log those permissions onto the blockchains Polygon, Solana, and Base, among others, the card company’s spokesperson told Fortune.

Other companies that are working with the payments giant to develop its AI payments protocol include fintech Adyen, crypto exchange Coinbase, and web-hosting giant Cloudflare.

“Am I expecting that this is going to be a huge revenue driver for Mastercard next year? No,” said Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer. “Do I think it’ll be a meaningful new addressable market for us over the next five years? I think so.”

Machine payments

Mastercard isn’t the only financial giant to devote resources to the burgeoning field of agentic finance. Corporate heavyweights like Visa and Stripe have also built out tools and protocols in anticipation of a future where bots will buy our groceries, manage our bank accounts, and pay for our video streaming subscriptions. 

While that vision hasn’t yet come to pass—agentic payment volumes are still a fraction of broader commercial flows—companies are still believers that humans will use AI to pay for products and that bots will pay other bots. 

For his own part, Mastercard’s Lambert predicted that AI chatbots will eventually sit between a meaningful share of e-commerce transactions. “It’s just easier for consumers to do,” he said. And while he was less certain of whether “machine-to-machine payments” will take off, he said that “too much is happening in that space” for some version of a bot-to-bot ecosystem not to take shape. 

Other companies to have launched AI payment networks and standards over the past year include Coinbase, which is behind the x402 protocol; Stripe, which worked with the blockchain project Tempo to develop what they call the Machine Payments Protocol; and Google, which released its own standard in September.

Updated, June 10, 2026: Updated Mastercard’s name for the new product as well as blockchains where permissions are stored.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com