Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M)
Mastercard's x402-based machine-to-machine payments for AI agents: signed payment vouchers within pre-authorized budgets; early-access pilot, not commercially available.
Tags
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.
Agent access
Related
- x402: Open standard for internet-native payments built on HTTP 402, letting APIs and agents pay per request across crypto and fiat networks.
- Mastercard Agent Suite for Merchants: Mastercard developer product to bring agentic commerce to merchants through a single integration.
- Coinbase CDP x402 Facilitator: Coinbase Developer Platform's x402 offering: a hosted facilitator that verifies and settles x402 payments, plus seller and buyer SDK quickstarts.
- Visa Intelligent Commerce: Visa's portfolio for agentic commerce, embedding payment credentials, controls, authentication and protections into AI-initiated purchases.
- Machine Payments Protocol (MPP): Open standard for machine-to-machine payments over HTTP 402, co-developed by Tempo and Stripe; charge per API request, tool call or content.
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/
Machine-readable
- JSON
- Markdown
- Source file on GitHub (edit via pull request)