Global payments giant Mastercard has unveiled Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), a new payment service designed to enable AI agents and machines to conduct automated transactions at machine speed across its global payments network, according to a Wednesday press release.
The company said the platform is built to support a future in which AI agents transact directly with one another, 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 AI agents to 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 automated payments that can be executed instantly, securely and at very low cost, including transactions worth only fractions of a cent.
Chief product officer Jorn Lambert said the technology could accelerate the growth of AI-powered business models by enabling machines to transact at volumes, speeds and values beyond the capabilities of traditional payment systems.
“Agent Pay for Machines will create the conditions for a superbloom of AI business models,” Lambert said. “Machine payments can make it possible for services to be bought and sold among agents at fundamentally different scales than payments today — very high volumes, very small values, very fast and at extremely 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 isn’t 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, and this collaboration with Mastercard turns that conviction into reality,” Nathan McCauley, co-founder and CEO of Anchorage Digital, said. “What makes this initiative so significant is that it brings together the trust and global reach of Mastercard’s network with the flexibility of multi-rail settlement, 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 bring agentic commerce to scale.”
The system extends Mastercard’s Agent Pay ecosystem with capabilities including credentialing, permission controls, automated transacting, and multi-rail settlement across fiat and stablecoins.
“The internet was built for human interactions, but the infrastructure of the future must be built for autonomous ones,” Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Cloudflare, commented on the move. “By partnering with Mastercard on Agent Pay for Machines, we are connecting our industry-leading developer and security platform with world-class payments infrastructure to power the next era of machine-to-machine commerce.”
