Agent Pay

Agent Pay is a service from Mastercard that lets an AI agent handle payments without ever seeing a person's actual card number.

It's a bit like handing someone a gift card that only works at a specific store for a set amount, instead of giving them your entire bank account and stamp. When you ask an AI agent to book a flight or buy something, it doesn't use your real card details — it uses a payment credential created just for that one transaction. That way, if the agent makes a mistake or gets hit by an outside attack, the damage is limited.

Around the same time, the card network Visa rolled out a similar service called Intelligent Commerce. This suggests card networks are reworking their payment infrastructure to prepare for an era of AI agents.

You'll see it in lines like: "Around the payment networks, Visa and Mastercard each rolled out Intelligent Commerce and Agent Pay respectively in April 2025, letting AI agents pay using tokenized payment credentials instead of card numbers." It often comes up in comparisons with crypto wallet services. One easy point of confusion: Agent Pay isn't a crypto wallet or a coin payment tool — it's a card-based tokenized payment service built by an existing card network company.