According to Fortune, Mastercard has announced a new protocol called Agent Pay for AI, designed to allow AI agents to pay one another and carry out small transfers. One example cited in the report is an AI agent automatically paying a website when it retrieves data in segments, replacing a process that would otherwise require a more manual payment flow.
A central part of Agent Pay for AI is the way it records the permissions that humans grant to AI agents. Mastercard is initially using the Polygon network so that those permissions and related activity can be transparent and verifiable. Multiple parties can check whether an AI agent has acted in line with the instructions it was given, creating an auditable basis for agents to participate in payment activity.
Mastercard is developing the protocol in cooperation with Adyen, Coinbase and Cloudflare. The companies involved span payments, crypto infrastructure and internet services, bringing together different parts of the technical stack needed for automated AI-agent transactions, on-chain permission records and online payment execution.
Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief product officer, said the protocol will not become a major source of revenue in the short term. However, he expects it to develop into a meaningful new market over the next five years. His comments frame Agent Pay for AI as a longer-term infrastructure effort aimed at commercial activity conducted by AI agents rather than an immediate revenue driver.
The report also noted that Visa, Stripe, Coinbase and Google are actively working on AI payment protocols. These efforts are part of a broader push toward “machine-to-machine payments” and a future in which AI chatbots play a leading role in e-commerce transactions. At present, however, agent-based payment volume remains relatively small, and the related protocols and use cases are still in an early stage.