Mastercard is moving its machine payments program out of closed partner testing: at Cloudflare Connect, the company opened early developer access to Agent Pay for Machines, its protocol for payments made by AI agents.

Developers get buyer-side and seller-side APIs, a toolkit and a testing sandbox. The system supports cards, bank accounts and stablecoins, each with built-in spending controls, and was piloted with Cloudflare, Coinbase, Base, Ant International, BVNK and AIsa.

In the demo, one AI agent made nine separate payments to two merchants from a single pre-approved budget, running on Coinbase's x402 protocol.

Agent permissions and credentials are recorded on Polygon, Solana and Base. Mastercard still describes the effort as a pilot and plans to refine it on developer feedback before any wider commercial rollout.