Mastercard has introduced Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) — a system for payments between AI agents. It allows programs to send money and make settlements through the company’s payment network without manual confirmation of each transaction.
AP4M is designed even for micropayments of less than one cent. This format can be useful for automatic settlements between applications, services, and connected devices.
At launch, more than 30 partners joined the project. Among them are Stripe, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Polygon, OKX and Ant International.
What AP4M Is For
AI agents are gradually ceasing to be just assistants for searching information or generating answers. Companies are increasingly testing scenarios where such systems can interact with services and perform practical tasks on their own.
Mastercard sees automatic payments as the next step. The user sets a goal and spending limit, and the agent pays for the necessary tools or services on its own.
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This is very different from ordinary online purchases. There, every action usually starts with a person. In AP4M settlements can go directly between systems and do not require confirmation of every small transaction.
Mastercard gives a simple example. The owner of a flower shop asks an AI to help launch a website. The agent can independently select and pay for a domain, hosting, images, checkout page, and other necessary services. The main thing is that all actions fit within the specified budget.
Jorn Lambert, responsible for product strategy at Mastercard, believes that machine payments can operate on a completely different scale than traditional payment services.
“Machine payments can make it possible to buy and sell services between agents on a scale fundamentally different from how payments work today,” Lambert said.
According to him, it is about a large number of transactions, minimal amounts, and very fast processing. It is precisely for such scenarios that AP4M is being created.
Permissions Will Be Stored on the Blockchain
In AP4M Mastercard decided to store the permissions that users give to AI agents not in an internal database, but in public blockchains.
At the first stage, Polygon, Solana and Base were chosen for this.
This format is needed to verify authority. Participants will be able to see for themselves whether the agent is acting within the restrictions set by the owner and not rely solely on records from Mastercard or another company.
Polygon has already confirmed its participation in the project on X. The company believes that cooperation will help develop common rules for interaction between AI agents and simplify automatic settlements between such systems.
For now, this is more of a foundation for the future than an everyday scenario. But more and more large companies are preparing for a market where programs will be able to independently order services, pay for them, and interact with each other without constant human oversight.
Mastercard Looks at the AI Market in the Long Term
Lambert admits that AP4M should not immediately become a major source of income for Mastercard.
“Do I expect this product to become a major source of income for Mastercard as early as next year? No,” he told Fortune in an interview.
At the same time, the company expects that within the next five years, agent payments could become a separate major direction.
Mastercard is not alone here. Over the past year, Visa, Stripe and Google have introduced their own solutions or standards for AI agent payments. While the volume of such transactions is still small compared to traditional payments, interest in the topic is growing rapidly.
Lambert believes that AI assistants will eventually be able to take over part of online purchases.
“For consumers, it is simply more convenient,” he noted.
With fully automatic payments between machines, the situation is still less predictable. But Lambert believes that too much is happening in this area for the direction to simply disappear.
Mastercard has not yet named the timing of the full launch of AP4M Mastercard. The project is currently at the stage of working with the first partners.
