Mastercard
Mastercard is expanding its payment security to AI-driven transactions through its Agent Pay program, launched in April 2025, which verifies and registers AI agents before allowing them to make purchases on users' behalf. The initiative extends existing fraud protections and dispute rights to AI-initiated payments, aiming to ensure trust and prevent unauthorized spending. Partnering with companies like PayPal, Microsoft, and Google, Mastercard is also exploring stablecoin settlement for smoother cross-border transactions.
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Mastercard has spent decades making humans’ credit card payments secure. Now it’s doing the same for purchases made by machines. As AI agents move from suggesting products to buying them on a users’ behalf, the payments giant—which processed $10.6 trillion of payments last year—is racing to ensure those orders are as trustworthy as the ones you place yourself. Its Agent Pay program, launched in April 2025, requires AI agents to be registered and verified before they can spend your money, extending the fraud protections and dispute rights of card payments to purchases made inside AI assistants. “It’s incredibly important that we get this right, because it only takes a few bad stories for the whole house of cards to start collapsing,” says chief product officer Jorn Lambert.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TIME — Top.
