Mastercard has opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines, its payment APIs for AI agents. The program follows pilots with six firms, including Coinbase and Base, and the project has not yet been made commercially available.
Mastercard is giving developers early access to Agent Pay for Machines after end-to-end pilots with Cloudflare, Ant International, BVNK, AIsa, Base and Coinbase. The program makes the first buyer- and seller-side APIs, a developer toolkit and a sandbox available. Mastercard is asking developers to test the APIs and say what they want added.
The project remains in a pilot stage and has not yet been made commercially available. Mastercard first announced the product in June, with support for spending controls and card, bank account and stablecoin payments.
A demo at Cloudflare Connect
At Cloudflare Connect, marketing agency Hype gave an AI agent a sample assignment to prepare a campaign for a protein bar launch. The agent bought social media research from AIsa and eight campaign images from Cloudflare AI Gateway, within a budget Hype approved. The demonstration involved nine payments to the two providers.
Coinbase and Base handle the crypto side
The agent paid through the Coinbase-incubated x402 protocol, which takes its name from the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code. When a merchant requested payment, the merchant returned an HTTP 402 response, and the merchant verified the agent's signed payment voucher before delivering the service. Mastercard said vouchers can be batched and redeemed later instead of settling each payment individually.
Coinbase Developer Platform supplied the wallet infrastructure that funded the agent, and Base was the onchain settlement network. BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider that Mastercard acquired in August, acted as the agent wallet and used Mastercard's Global Money Platform to process payments and settlement in fiat or stablecoins.
According to Mastercard in a statement shared with The Block: "Now AI agents need a way to pay for them."
Source: The Block
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