Mastercard Agent Pay
Mastercard's program for enabling and securing payments that AI agents make on a cardholder's behalf.
What is Mastercard Agent Pay?
Agent Pay is Mastercard's program for letting AI agents make purchases on a cardholder's behalf while keeping the transaction as secure as a normal card payment. Rather than handing an AI assistant the actual card number, Mastercard issues a special token tied to that specific agent, that specific merchant, and the specific spending rules the cardholder set, so if anything is misused, the token, not the underlying card, is what's exposed. It's the card-network equivalent of giving an assistant a limited-use gift card instead of a wallet.
Why it matters
Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay on April 29, 2025, with launch partners including Microsoft, IBM, and Braintree, built around "Agentic Tokens" that extend Mastercard's existing tokenization infrastructure (the same system behind mobile contactless payments and card-on-file security) by binding a token to a specific agent, merchant scope, and consent policy. Mastercard piloted the program with Citi and U.S. Bank in September 2025 before reaching all U.S. cardholders by November 2025, and expanded internationally, including a Latin America and Caribbean rollout announced in December 2025. In June 2026, Mastercard extended the program with "Agent Pay for Machines," enabling automated agent-to-agent and machine-to-machine payments, including sub-cent transactions, across its network.