The protocol is built around a specific use case that existing payment infrastructure handles poorly: small, automated, machine-to-machine transactions. When an AI agent needs to access data piecemeal from a website, or pay another service incrementally for a task it is performing on a user’s behalf, traditional card rails — built for human-initiated, merchant-facing transactions — are poorly suited for the job. Agent Pay for AI is designed to fill that gap, per Fortune’s reporting.
The decision to log permissions onto a public blockchain rather than a private database is a deliberate architectural choice. Multiple parties that want to verify whether an agent is acting within the boundaries a human has authorized can access that information directly on-chain, without relying on a single centralized authority to confirm it, per Fortune. Mastercard selected Polygon for the initial deployment.
Three companies are working with Mastercard to develop the protocol: fintech platform Adyen, crypto exchange Coinbase, and web infrastructure giant Cloudflare, per Fortune’s reporting. The combination of a payment processor, a crypto-native exchange, and the company that handles a significant share of the internet’s traffic signals that Mastercard is building Agent Pay for AI as interoperable infrastructure rather than a proprietary walled garden.
The competitive landscape is already crowded. Visa and Stripe have each built tools anticipating a world where AI bots buy groceries, manage bank accounts, and pay for subscriptions. Coinbase launched the x402 protocol for AI payments, Stripe collaborated with Tempo to develop the Machine Payments Protocol, and Google released its own standard in September 2025, per Fortune.
Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s Chief Product Officer, was measured about near-term commercial expectations in his conversation with Fortune. He does not expect Agent Pay for AI to be a significant revenue driver in the next twelve months. Over five years, however, he described it as a meaningful new addressable market. Lambert separately predicted that AI chatbots will eventually sit between a meaningful share of e-commerce transactions — framing the protocol not as a speculative bet but as infrastructure being built ahead of an inevitable shift in how commerce flows.
This development marks a pivotal moment for the nascent sector’s convergence with artificial intelligence. Mastercard choosing a public blockchain to anchor the permissions layer of its AI payment infrastructure — one week after opening its global settlement rails to six regulated stablecoins across eight blockchain networks — confirms that the world’s second-largest card network is systematically rebuilding its core architecture around crypto rails rather than alongside them.
Cover image from Grok, ETHUSD chart from Tradingview
