Alchemy adds support for Mastercard Agent Pay, letting AI agents check out with real payment credentials

Alchemy, a blockchain and AI-agent infrastructure company, announced support for Mastercard Agent Pay, allowing AI agents built on its platform to complete purchases using real Mastercard-backed payment credentials rather than a human manually entering card details at checkout.

The integration runs through what the companies describe as the Agent Card standard: a way for an AI agent to be issued a verifiable payment credential tied to a Mastercard account, which merchants and payment processors can recognize and authorize much as they would a conventional card transaction. Mastercard has been building out Agent Pay as its own framework for agent-initiated commerce, and Alchemy’s move plugs its developer base of AI-agent builders directly into that network.

The announcement sits inside a wider shift the payments industry has been describing over the past year: AI agents that complete a purchase or payment rather than only recommending one, sometimes called agentic commerce. Visa, Mastercard and other networks have each rolled out some version of an agent-payment credential or verification framework over the same period, aimed at giving merchants a way to distinguish a legitimate AI-agent transaction from fraud, since an agent transacting without a human present breaks assumptions built into decades of card-fraud detection.

Neither company disclosed transaction volumes, merchant adoption figures, or a specific rollout timeline for the integration beyond announcing that support is now available to developers building on Alchemy’s platform. As with other agent-payment announcements this year, the practical impact will depend on how many merchants configure their systems to accept Agent Card transactions, which is a separate and slower-moving question from whether the underlying credential technology exists.