Permission, Payment Requests and Settlement
**Mastercard Agent Pay is the card-based program.** Announced April 29, 2025, it uses tokenized payment credentials for agent-led purchases. Mastercard’s developer guide describes enrollment, identity verification, authentication of consumer intent and checkout with a tokenized payload. Integrators must register with Mastercard; the issuer authorizes the transaction. This connects agents to card payments rather than replacing the card network with a new cryptocurrency.
**AP2 supplies verifiable authorization evidence.** Google introduced it on Sept. 16, 2025 and released v0.2 on April 28, 2026. The v0.2 specification separates a Checkout Mandate—proof of what the agent may buy—from a Payment Mandate authorizing payment for that checkout. For autonomous purchases, user-signed open mandates set constraints, and the agent signs the finalized mandates within them. AP2 defines verification responsibilities; payment processing belongs to the payment processor, not to a new AP2 settlement network.
**x402 carries the payment exchange.** Coinbase launched the open protocol on May 6, 2025; V2 followed on Dec. 11, 2025. In the documented HTTP flow, a server quotes payment requirements, the client signs a payment and retries its request, and a facilitator can verify and settle it. The protocol does not prescribe a single payment rail. Current V2 documentation distinguishes schemes that typically settle immediately from batch settlement, which authorizes payment upfront and redeems value onchain later.
**Agent Pay for Machines adds Mastercard’s machine-payment infrastructure.** Introduced June 10, 2026, Mastercard describes it as combining credentialing and programmatically enforced spending rules with settlement across cards, accounts and stablecoins. Mastercard opened early access on Oct. 20, offering initial buyer- and seller-side APIs, a toolkit, sandbox and documentation. It builds on x402: an agent answers a “402 Payment Required” response with a signed voucher within its approved limit. The seller verifies it and delivers the service; vouchers can be combined and redeemed later.
What Has Actually Been Connected?
Google publishes an AP2 sample using x402-compatible payments. Mastercard and Google also co-developed Verifiable Intent, announced March 5, 2026, as an authorization-record standard aligned with AP2. Those links establish shared development and a sample implementation. The conceptual flow above does not imply that all four offerings run together.
Mastercard’s machine-payment demonstration supplies a concrete example. According to its Oct. 20 account, marketing agency Hype approved one budget for an agent that bought research from AIsa and eight images through Cloudflare AI Gateway—nine payments to two merchants. Coinbase Developer Platform supplied wallet infrastructure, Base supplied the onchain settlement network, and BVNK handled fiat or stablecoin payment and settlement.
As The Defiant’s pilot report explains, the developer opening expands testing access. Mastercard’s sign-up page still states that Agent Pay for Machines is “in a pilot and not available commercially.”
