Mastercard has quietly rolled out Agent Pay for AI, a new protocol that lets artificial-intelligence agents pay one another and handle micropayments — with human-granted permissions recorded on Polygon, the Ethereum layer-2 network, Fortune reported June 10.
Why it matters: current payment rails are built for human-initiated purchases and merchant checkouts, not for high-frequency, tiny machine-to-machine transactions. When an AI assistant needs to buy data by the byte, pay a service incrementally for a task, or otherwise transact on a user’s behalf in tiny increments, traditional card networks become awkward and costly. Agent Pay for AI is explicitly designed to bridge that gap.
Mastercard intentionally stores agent permissions on a public blockchain so multiple parties can independently verify that an AI is operating within the bounds a human authorized — without relying on any single centralized authority. For this initial deployment the company chose Polygon as the on-chain layer.
Mastercard is developing the protocol with three partners: fintech platform Adyen, crypto exchange Coinbase, and internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. That trio — a payments processor, a crypto-native exchange, and a company that routes a large share of web traffic — signals Mastercard’s goal of building interoperable infrastructure rather than locking users into a closed ecosystem.
The move puts Mastercard into an already crowded field. Visa and Stripe are both preparing for an AI-driven payments future: Coinbase has introduced the x402 protocol for agent payments, Stripe worked with Tempo on the Machine Payments Protocol, and Google published its own AI-payments standard in September 2025, Fortune notes.
Mastercard’s chief product officer, Jorn Lambert, tempered expectations about immediate returns: he doesn’t expect Agent Pay for AI to drive significant revenue in the next 12 months. Over five years, though, he views it as a meaningful new addressable market, and he predicts AI chatbots will increasingly intermediate e-commerce transactions — framing the protocol as infrastructure built ahead of an expected shift in how commerce flows.
Strategically, the launch underscores a broader pivot. Coming just a week after Mastercard opened its global settlement rails to six regulated stablecoins across eight blockchain networks, Agent Pay for AI signals the company is systematically rebuilding parts of its architecture around crypto rails rather than tacking blockchain on as an afterthought.
(Reporting based on Fortune, June 10.)
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