Agent payments

Agent payments are payments that an AI agent initiates on behalf of a person or business, together with the evidence that the agent was allowed to make them.

Why they need more than a card number. A card payment assumes the cardholder, or a merchant the cardholder trusts, entered the details. When an agent pays, every party downstream needs to know what the principal approved, which agent is acting, and that the payment matches that approval. Today’s standards split the job into three layers.

Authorization evidence. AP2 v0.2 defines signed mandates. The Checkout Mandate tells the merchant the agent may buy a specific checkout. The Payment Mandate tells the credential provider, network and merchant payment processor the agent may pay for it. Both can be signed by the user directly, or by the agent under constraints the user signed earlier.

Scoped credentials. Card networks issue credentials that only an agent can use in a limited way. Visa Intelligent Commerce provisions agent-specific payment tokens and checks that authorizations match the user’s authenticated instruction. Mastercard Agent Pay uses agentic tokens from its tokenization service. The Agentic Commerce Protocol’s Delegate Payment API returns a vault token bound by an allowance: a maximum amount, a currency, one checkout session, one merchant and an expiry time.

Payment inside the exchange. x402 lets a server request payment and a client pay in the same exchange. Over HTTP this uses status 402 and payment headers. Over A2A, the server moves the task to input-required and carries the payment requirements in message metadata. A facilitator can verify and settle the payment for the server.

Where they meet. The layers combine. An agent can present an AP2 mandate, pay with an agent-specific network token or through x402, and keep the receipts both standards return. For a full walkthrough, read Agent payments: AP2 and x402 compared.

Emissar. Emissar’s Settle module is planned on top of AP2 and x402, with amounts checked against Mandate limits before money moves. Emissar does not define its own payment protocol. Status: Planned.

Neighbouring terms. Agentic commerce is the wider activity. A spend limit caps what an agent may commit.