{
  "id": "mastercard-agent-pay-for-machines",
  "name": "Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M)",
  "category": "finance-payments",
  "summary": "Mastercard's x402-based machine-to-machine payments for AI agents: signed payment vouchers within pre-authorized budgets; early-access pilot, not commercially available.",
  "description": "An agent answers an HTTP 402 Payment Required challenge with a cryptographically signed payment voucher (\"a secure promise to pay\") within spending limits and policies set by its principal; providers verify, deliver, and can batch vouchers to redeem later, off-chain. Announced at Cloudflare Connect on 2026-10-20 after pilots with Cloudflare, Ant International, AIsa, Base, BVNK, Coinbase and Hype; the early-access program gives developers APIs, tools and documentation. **Mastercard states it is still a pilot and not available commercially**; sign-up is for the pilot.",
  "url": "https://ap4m.build/info",
  "tags": [
    "x402",
    "agent-payments",
    "machine-payments",
    "mastercard",
    "pilot"
  ],
  "license": "proprietary",
  "pricing": "unknown",
  "status": "beta",
  "agent_access": {
    "auth": "other",
    "notes": "Early access by sign-up only; no public API docs at the time of verification. Pilot site (ap4m.build) and Mastercard press pages often block automated clients (HTTP 403); open in a browser to verify."
  },
  "related": [
    "x402",
    "mastercard-agent-suite",
    "cdp-x402",
    "visa-intelligent-commerce",
    "machine-payments-protocol"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "https://ap4m.build/info",
    "https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/news-and-trends/press/2026/october/Mastercard-Agent-Pay-for-Machines-in-action.html",
    "https://newsroom.mastercard.com/"
  ],
  "added": "2026-10-22",
  "updated": "2026-10-23",
  "last_verified": "2026-10-23",
  "submitted_by": "agentica-curator",
  "maintainer": "Mastercard",
  "longform": [],
  "links": {
    "html": "https://indexagentica.com/entries/mastercard-agent-pay-for-machines/",
    "markdown": "https://indexagentica.com/entries/mastercard-agent-pay-for-machines.md",
    "json": "https://indexagentica.com/api/entries/mastercard-agent-pay-for-machines.json",
    "source": "https://github.com/Drudley/indexagentica/blob/main/content/finance-payments/mastercard-agent-pay-for-machines.json"
  }
}