Mastercard’s Agent Pay: how a card network lets an AI check out for you

How does a merchant trust that an AI agent tapping “buy” is really acting for you — and only within your limits? Mastercard answers with Agent Pay, announced April 29, 2025, its framework for letting verified AI agents transact on a shopper’s behalf.

The core piece is the Agentic Token — an extension of the tokenization that already powers Apple Pay and Google Pay. It binds a card credential to a specific agent and consent policy, so an assistant can complete a checkout without ever holding your real card number. Mastercard pairs it with a Payment Passkey to verify the shopper, and because the token lives at the network, pulling an agent’s authorization invalidates the token — the next attempted charge simply fails. Mastercard introduced it with partners including Microsoft.

Like Visa’s rails, this makes an agent’s payment secure, scoped, and revocable — real progress. But a token can’t tell you whether the thing is worth buying. That’s the buy-side job OwnWise is built for: diagnose the fault, weigh repair against replace, check a fair price, and surface any warranty or recall first — so the safest purchase is sometimes the one you skip.