Global payments giant Mastercard announced Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new payments service designed to enable AI agents and machines to execute automated transactions at machine speed across the company’s global payments network, according to a press release on Wednesday.
The company says the platform is built to support a future in which AI agents transact directly with each other, enabling always-on commerce and high-volume microtransactions. The system is supported by over 30 industry players including Stripe, Adyen, Coinbase, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, BVNK, Aave Labs, and OKX.
Mastercard expects that AI agents will increasingly perform tasks such as purchasing services, coordinating business operations, and managing transactions on behalf of individuals and organizations.
To facilitate these activities, Agent Pay for Machines enables automatic payments, including transactions as small as a few cents, that can be made instantly, securely, and at a very low cost.
Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert said the technology enables machines to transact at volumes, speeds and values beyond the capabilities of traditional payment systems, potentially accelerating the growth of AI-powered business models.
“Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for AI business models to bloom,” Lambert said. “Machine payments will enable services to be bought and sold between agents at a fundamentally different scale than payments today, in very high volumes, in very small amounts, very fast and with very low latency.”
Unlike traditional consumer payments, AP4M operates as an always-on system where transactions occur between machines in the background of digital commerce.
“The future of commerce is not just digital, it’s autonomous. At Anchorage Digital, we’ve long believed that programmable, machine-driven payments are the inevitable next layer of financial infrastructure. This partnership with Mastercard makes that belief a reality,” said Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital. “What makes this work so important is that it combines the reliability and global reach of Mastercard’s network with the flexibility of multi-rail payments, including digital assets, creating a foundation that our clients can build on with confidence. This is exactly the kind of open, interoperable infrastructure the industry needs to scale agenttic commerce.”
The system expands Mastercard’s Agent Pay ecosystem with features such as authentication, authorization controls, automated transactions, and multi-rail payments across fiat currencies and stablecoins.
Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Cloudflare, commented on the move: “The internet was built for human interaction, but the infrastructure of the future must be built for autonomous infrastructure.” “By partnering with Mastercard on Agent Pay for Machines, we are connecting an industry-leading developer and security platform with world-class payments infrastructure to power the next era of machine-to-machine commerce.”
