Jorn Lambert unveiled Mastercard's first agent payment tool in April 2025, a small token system that let chatbots buy for a shopper1. Fourteen months later, on June 10, 2026, he returned with Agent Pay for Machines2. Different customer entirely. An agent pays another agent, with human oversight outside the deal, and more than 30 partners already connected. Between those two dates, five of the world's largest payment and tech companies raced to define how a machine spends money. What emerged reads less like open competition and more like five camps settling on one standard.
Four rival agent payment rails launched in the 14 months between Mastercard's two Agent Pay products
Launch dates of agent payment protocols and products, April 2025 to June 10, 2026
Each pin is one launch on a rail spaced by real time: magenta pins are Mastercard's two Agent Pay products, and blue pins are the rival rails that arrived between them.
Sources: Mastercard [1]; Mastercard [2]; Visa [3]; Stripe [5]; Google Cloud [6]; Coinbase [9]. Chart by Kelly Dennis.
The numbers behind this chart
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| April 2025 | Mastercard Agent Pay. Mastercard unveils Agent Pay; Agentic Tokens let chatbots buy for a shopper |
| May 6, 2025 | Coinbase x402. Coinbase launches x402; A stablecoin micropayment standard built on HTTP's 402 status code |
| Sept. 16, 2025 | Google AP2. Google publishes AP2; More than 60 partner organizations joined at launch |
| Sept. 29, 2025 | Stripe and OpenAI ACP. Stripe and OpenAI's checkout protocol; The Agentic Commerce Protocol, built on Shared Payment Tokens |
| Oct. 14, 2025 | Visa's agent protocol. Visa launches Trusted Agent Protocol; An industry-run check that tells shopping agents from scraping bots |
| June 10, 2026 | Agent Pay for Machines. Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines; More than 30 partners connected at launch |
Mastercard bets twice
Lambert's first product used tokens Mastercard already ran at scale1. Agentic Tokens registered and checked a trusted agent before any purchase cleared, adding biometric checks and fraud screening to rails built decades ago for people. Microsoft plugged the tool into Azure OpenAI Service and Copilot Studio. IBM wired it into watsonx Orchestrate for business buying. Braintree and Checkout.com carried the tokens to merchants directly. Lambert framed the launch in his own words. "Mastercard is transforming the way the world pays for the better by anticipating consumer needs on the horizon".
Agent Pay for Machines dropped the human shopper. Lambert described the change bluntly. Machine payments, he said, could let services trade between agents "at fundamentally different scales than payments today," at high volume, tiny value and very low latency2. The partner list merges card incumbents with crypto firms. Cloudflare, Coinbase, Stripe and Tempo sit beside Adyen, Global Payments and Santander's Getnet. Aave Labs, Alchemy, Anchorage Digital, Polygon, Ripple and the Solana Foundation joined too. Mastercard chose to absorb the stablecoin world rather than fight it.
Visa builds a trust layer
A narrower angle defined Visa's approach. Its earlier Intelligent Commerce program let agents shop with a Visa-linked account3. The harder problem came second. How does a merchant tell a real shopping agent from a scraping bot? Trusted Agent Protocol, launched Oct. 14, 2025, answers through an industry-run check rather than one company's call. Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product and strategy officer, posted the announcement himself. "We have introduced Trusted Agent Protocol, a new milestone in the AI commerce journey," he wrote, adding that the goal was giving merchants "the same confidence they serve human customers" already carry4. Akamai joined as a security partner, putting bot detection into the layer merchants rely on. Forestell's framing matters. Visa picked identity and trust as its entry into agent commerce, and left the speed contest to Mastercard.
Stripe and OpenAI build the checkout
One company aimed straight at the checkout button instead of the card networks. On Sept. 29, 2025, Stripe and OpenAI jointly released the Agentic Commerce Protocol5. The open standard uses Shared Payment Tokens, so ChatGPT can finish a purchase while a shopper's real card number stays hidden. Will Gaybrick, Stripe's president of technology and business, stated the aim directly. "Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI". Kevin Miller, Stripe's head of payments, drew the line through history. "Stripe has spent the last 15 years optimizing commerce for human buyers. Now, we are starting to do the same for agents".
Fidji Simo, OpenAI's chief executive of applications, cast the work as reach. "By co-developing the Agentic Commerce Protocol with Stripe, we're making it possible for businesses of all sizes to meet people where they are"5. Etsy went live in the United States immediately. Shopify signed on for a rollout the announcement put at more than a million merchants, Glossier, Vuori, Spanx and SKIMS among them. Stripe's parallel stablecoin build, on the Paradigm-backed Tempo blockchain, gave it a second rail once Tempo's own agent protocol went live in March 2026.
Google writes the standard everyone borrows
The most technically ambitious answer arrived a week before Stripe's. On Sept. 16, 2025, Google published the Agent Payments Protocol, AP26. It builds on Google's own Agent2Agent protocol and the Model Context Protocol Anthropic had shipped the previous November. Stavan Parikh, who runs payments at Google, and Rao Surapaneni, who runs the business applications platform, wrote the spec together.
AP2's core piece is the Mandate, a signed record6. An Intent Mandate records what a shopper agreed to. A Cart Mandate locks the exact items and price once an agent finishes a purchase. The chain gives a merchant, a bank or a court an answer to who approved what. Payment type stays open by design, covering cards, stablecoins and bank transfers on equal terms. More than 60 organizations signed on as launch partners, among them Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, Coinbase, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, Deloitte and PwC. A list that wide makes AP2 shared plumbing, rather than one company's product.
PayPal and the crypto rail underneath everyone
Two fronts moved at once for PayPal. Agentic Commerce Services launched in 2025, letting AI shopping agents buy through PayPal-linked accounts7. By early 2026 the company had joined Google's AP2 group, framed in its own release as supporting “Trusted AI Checkout with Google”8. PayPal sits by name in Google's AP2 partner list too, one company touching two of the five protocols here6.
Underneath all of them runs Coinbase's x402. It turned HTTP's dormant 402 status code into a stablecoin micropayment standard on May 6, 2025, built by Erik Reppel, the company's head of engineering9. Coinbase shows up as a partner in Mastercard's roster and in Google's AP2 list26. One company links card money, bank money and stablecoin money.
What the overlap means
Read one at a time, five protocols in fifteen months looks like fragmentation, the kind of standards fight that runs for years before one format wins. Set the partner lists side by side, and the opposite appears. Coinbase, Stripe, Cloudflare, Mastercard and PayPal show up across multiple rosters at once2569. The infrastructure converged while the branding stayed separate.
Google and Mastercard tied two of the five rails together in March. Mastercard built Verifiable Intent, a record of what a shopper told an agent to buy, to work with Google's AP2 standard10. Stavan Parikh signed off on the fit. "Strong, interoperable trust infrastructure like Verifiable Intent that is compatible with Agent Payments Protocol is a natural accelerator for scaling agentic commerce," Parikh said. Parikh's verb was accelerator, the word two companies use when they plan to grow together.
Alchemy already shows up as a partner in Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines roster2. Its chief technology officer reads that overlap as a warning sign. Guillaume Poncin built AgentPay in April, a single endpoint that takes payment from an agent on any protocol it supports11. He laid out the stakes plainly. "Without a unifying layer, fragmentation across agentic payment protocols is not sustainable and will only increase as more systems launch," Poncin said. The product itself supplies the proof. Alchemy needed one endpoint because five protocols still require five separate integrations.
Agent frameworks built on the Model Context Protocol and Agent2Agent now need a payment step to close a deal. Every major payments company decided, on its own, that the step had to work with the others rather than trap a merchant on one rail. Cost matters here too. Gartner's Aug. 10, 2026 forecast projected 96% growth in AI-ready cloud spending this year. Rails that settle at agent speed, at a price a machine deal can bear, became a requirement for the economy Gartner measures. They arrived before the applications meant to run on them.
By the numbers
- April 2025: the month Mastercard unveiled the original Agent Pay, its first agentic tokenization tool1.
- June 10, 2026: the launch date of Mastercard's Agent Pay for Machines, with more than 30 partners attached2.
- Oct. 14, 2025: the day Visa introduced Trusted Agent Protocol, its industry-run verification system3.
- Sept. 16, 2025: the day Google published AP2, extending Agent2Agent and the Model Context Protocol6.
- More than 60 partner organizations joined at AP2's launch6.
- Sept. 29, 2025: the day Stripe and OpenAI jointly released the Agentic Commerce Protocol5.
- Shopify committed more than a million merchants to the Stripe and OpenAI checkout rail5.
- May 6, 2025: the launch of Coinbase's x402 stablecoin standard, now a partner rail for card networks9.
What to watch
Volume numbers will separate real machine-to-machine trade from announcements still waiting on traffic. Whichever company publishes settlement figures first resets the baseline. Tests between AP2's Mandates, Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol and Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens deserve close attention356. A shopper's agent crossing from one merchant's rail to another needs its credentials to travel with it. Regulatory guidance on agent-authorized spending stays the open question. Every one of these companies has left one case unanswered in public: a purchase an agent completes while the human who delegated it sits elsewhere.
Sources
- "Mastercard unveils Agent Pay, pioneering agentic payments technology to power commerce in the age of AI," Mastercard, April 2025, https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/news-and-trends/press/2025/april/mastercard-unveils-agent-pay-pioneering-agentic-payments-technology-to-power-commerce-in-the-age-of-ai.html.
- "Mastercard Launches Agent Pay for Machines to Unlock Super-Fast, Always-On Payments," Mastercard, June 10, 2026, https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/news-and-trends/press/2026/june/mastercard-launches-agent-pay-for-machines.html.
- "Visa Introduces Trusted Agent Protocol: An Ecosystem-Led Framework for AI Commerce," Visa, Oct. 14, 2025, https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2025/Visa-Introduces-Trusted-Agent-Protocol-An-Ecosystem-Led-Framework-for-AI-Commerce/default.aspx.
- Jack Forestell, post on X, Oct. 14, 2025, https://x.com/jackforestell/status/1978088755928936702.
- "Stripe powers Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and releases Agentic Commerce Protocol codeveloped with OpenAI," Stripe, Sept. 29, 2025, https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-openai-instant-checkout.
- Stavan Parikh and Rao Surapaneni, "Announcing Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)," Google Cloud, Sept. 16, 2025, https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/announcing-agents-to-payments-ap2-protocol.
- "PayPal Launches Agentic Commerce Services to Power AI-Driven Shopping," PayPal, 2025, https://investor.pypl.com/news-and-events/news-details/2025/PayPal-Launches-Agentic-Commerce-Services-to-Power-AI-Driven-Shopping/default.aspx.
- "From Search to Checkout: PayPal Supports Trusted AI Checkout with Google," PayPal, 2026, https://investor.pypl.com/news-and-events/news-details/2026/From-Search-to-Checkout-PayPal-Supports-Trusted-AI-Checkout-with-Google/default.aspx.
- Erik Reppel, "Introducing x402: a new standard for internet-native payments," Coinbase, May 6, 2025, https://www.coinbase.com/developer-platform/discover/launches/x402.
- "Mastercard Unveils Open Standard to Verify AI Agent Transactions," PYMNTS, March 5, 2026, https://www.pymnts.com/mastercard/2026/mastercard-unveils-open-standard-to-verify-ai-agent-transactions/.
- Iulia Musat, "Alchemy launches AgentPay to unify fragmented AI agent payment protocols," The Paypers, April 14, 2026, https://thepaypers.com/crypto-web3-and-cbdc/news/alchemy-launches-agentpay-to-unify-fragmented-ai-agent-payment-protocols.