Mastercard has opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines, a system that lets AI agents discover services, agree to terms and pay for them within spending limits set by humans. Jorn Lambert of Mastercard demonstrated a live transaction at Cloudflare's Connect conference. The system is built on the x402 protocol, with agents generating signed payment vouchers when they receive a “402 Payment Required” response. In a demo, a marketing agent for agency Hype made nine payments to two independent merchants on one budget, settled through Coinbase, Base and BVNK in fiat or stablecoins. The launch follows pilots with Cloudflare, Ant International, AWS, BVNK and Coinbase, and comes alongside Mastercard's recent Stablecoin Security tool and Global Money Platform.
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