Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M)

Verification notes: New listing, added this pass. Announced June 10, 2026 via Mastercard's own newsroom press release. Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) is positioned as the machine-to-machine counterpart to Mastercard's 2025 Agent Pay program: where Agent Pay covers a trusted AI agent acting on a consumer's behalf in a single transaction, AP4M targets continuous, high-frequency, often sub-cent transactions executed autonomously between systems — an agent paying for compute, data, or freight handling as one step in a longer automated chain — settled across cards, bank accounts, and stablecoins on Mastercard's global network. More than 30 companies are named as initial participants, including Adyen, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Stripe, and Skyfire (see that listing), alongside stablecoin infrastructure providers like BVNK, Ripple, and the Solana Foundation. Credentialing runs through Mastercard's separately announced Verifiable Intent framework (co-developed with Google, announced March 5, 2026), an open-sourced cryptographic specification that links a consumer's identity, their original instructions to an agent, and the transaction outcome into a single tamper-resistant record — the basis for marking cryptoSigned true here. No MCP or A2A protocol support is documented in Mastercard's own materials; this is card-network payment infrastructure rather than an agent-tooling or agent-communication protocol, so both flags stay false rather than assumed. No independent third-party audit of AP4M itself has been located. Distinct from, and by Mastercard's own description complementary to, other payment-protocol listings here: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol (agent recognition at checkout), Google's AP2 (signed Mandates), and Coinbase's x402 (stablecoin micropayments over HTTP, and one of AP4M's named settlement partners). Mastercard is also named alongside Visa in the newly added Ant International Agentic Mobile Protocol listing's in-development Know-Your-Agent (KYA) collaboration. Re-checked 2026-09-28: Mastercard's own AP4M product page reconfirms the Discover/Authorize/Execute/Settle model, off-chain verification, and settlement guarantee described in the June 10, 2026 launch release; no GA or expansion announcement has followed since launch. One correction: the framing above that positions AP4M as complementary to Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Google's AP2 is not something Mastercard itself states — neither Mastercard page mentions a competing protocol by name. That comparison originated from third-party coverage (Fortune, CoinDesk) rather than the operator, and should be read as this directory's own analytical framing, not a Mastercard claim.