Mastercard Agent Pay

The press release of April 2025 sets out the basic rules of the program. Mastercard registers and verifies each AI agent before it pays, the payment runs with a token at merchants that accept cards online, and the cardholder decides what the agent may buy.

The cardholder confirms purchases with biometrics on the phone, as Mastercard describes the flow. That confirmation keeps an agent payment within the rules for strong customer authentication that apply to online card payments in Europe.

Mastercard Agentic Tokens build on the network tokenization that already protects contactless payments with a phone, cards stored with merchants and Mastercard Payment Passkeys. The agent never receives the card number, and the token of one agent can be suspended without blocking the card itself.

At launch Mastercard named Microsoft with Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot Studio as the first AI platform partner. IBM with watsonx Orchestrate joined for purchases between companies, and Braintree and Checkout.com for the merchant side. Stripe added Agent Pay tokens for its Shared Payment Tokens in March 2026.

On 2 March 2026 Banco Santander completed a payment by an AI agent through its live payment systems, in a controlled environment and with Agent Pay. The bank stated that the pilot ran within its regulated payment framework and was no commercial rollout yet.

On 2 June 2026 Worldline and ING reported the first agentic payment in production in Europe. A merchant agent selected concert tickets within a budget for an ING cardholder in the Netherlands and paid only after the customer approved the purchase. The transaction carried identifiers that showed ING as the issuing bank that an agent had started it.

On 10 June 2026 Mastercard introduced Agent Pay for Machines, a service for payments that software agents make for companies. Every agent receives credentials with Verifiable Intent, the company sets spending limits that the system enforces, and settlement runs across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins.

Mastercard named more than 30 launch partners, among them Adyen, Checkout.com, Coinbase, Getnet by Santander, Global Payments, OKX and Stripe. The service targets the same market as machine-to-machine payments and x402, where agents pay per request for data and computing power.

Mastercard Agent Pay is the program with which registered AI agents pay with Mastercard Agentic Tokens on behalf of a cardholder. Issuers and merchants see that an agent started the payment, and the cardholder sets the limits.

Worldline processed the first production payment for ING, Checkout.com and Braintree joined as merchant partners, and Stripe accepts Agent Pay tokens in its Shared Payment Tokens. Agent Pay for Machines started with more than 30 partners, including Adyen and Global Payments.

Both programs give AI agents network tokens instead of card numbers and let the issuer see agent payments. Agent Pay runs on the Mastercard network, while Visa Intelligent Commerce is the program of Visa for the same purpose.