Mastercard opened early access to Agent Pay for Machines and demonstrated a live transaction at Cloudflare Connect. The system lets AI agents find services, agree to terms and pay within spending limits set by a human. The source does not give a calendar date for the demonstration.
In the demo, a marketing agent made nine payments to two merchants under one budget, without separate accounts or invoices. The system uses the x402 protocol: when a service requests payment, an agent creates a signed voucher that the provider checks before delivering the service. Mastercard is releasing APIs, a toolkit and a sandbox for developers.
