Alchemy has integrated Mastercard Agent Pay into its AgentCard product, letting AI agents make purchases at merchants that accept Mastercard online.
The move intends to let developers build AI agents capable of completing purchases on a user's behalf, rather than limiting agents to product recommendations or search assistance.
How the integration works
AgentCard provides developers with a single command-line interface through which an agent can be equipped with an email address, a phone number, a stablecoin wallet, and one-time-use Mastercard payment credentials. According to Alchemy, an agent can be provisioned with these tools in under one minute. The stablecoin wallet allows agents to use emerging agentic payment protocols, while the one-time-use Mastercard credentials are designed to let agents transact at online merchants that continue to rely on card rails rather than blockchain-based payment methods.
The one-time-use credentials are tokenised and linked to a user's existing Mastercard account, which Alchemy said preserves existing rewards, credit lines, and card benefits without requiring a new account or credential to be created. Users and card issuers can set spending limits, restrict transactions to specific merchant categories, and define where an agent is permitted to transact, with agents required to act within these approved boundaries.
Verifiable Intent and issuer controls
The integration is designed to support Mastercard's Verifiable Intent framework, which provides evidence that an agent acted within a user's authorised instructions. The framework is built to help consumers, merchants, and issuers establish what a transaction was authorised for, under what conditions, and by which party, addressing a recurring concern in agentic commerce around accountability when a non-human party initiates a payment.
Sherri Haymond, EVP of Digital Commercialization, said the Agent Pay framework is intended to bring trust, safeguards, and consumer control to agentic commerce as it moves from experimentation toward broader use.
Deployment options and context
Consumers can register an agent directly through AgentCard.ai, while businesses can deploy a pre-built experience or integrate AgentCard's identity, wallet, and payment capabilities into their own products. Developers can also programme custom agents using the CLI.
The announcement follows a broader pattern of payment networks building infrastructure for AI-initiated transactions, as agents take on a larger role in product discovery, decision-making, and checkout.
