Mastercard opens early access to Agent Pay for Machines

Mastercard opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines on October 20, 2026: an AI agent made 9 payments to 2 merchants within one budget and one approved plan, with no separate accounts or API keys. Payments run over the x402 protocol, with Coinbase supplying wallet infrastructure, Base as the settlement network and BVNK as the agent wallet. The service remains in pilot stage and is not commercially available.

• Demo: 9 payments, 2 merchants, 1 budget and 1 human-approved plan
• x402 protocol: merchant verifies a signed payment voucher on an HTTP 402 response
• Coinbase provides the wallet, Base settles, BVNK acts as the agent wallet
• Pilots with six partners including Cloudflare, Coinbase and Ant International