Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa Trusted Agent Protocol solve different parts of agentic payments. Agent Pay, announced by Mastercard on April 29, 2025, gives registered AI agents tokenized credentials to pay with. Trusted Agent Protocol, unveiled by Visa on October 14, 2025, helps merchants recognise trusted agents and separate them from malicious bots.
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So the two are not like-for-like products. Agent Pay is a payment credential program. Trusted Agent Protocol is an agent identity layer that sits inside the broader Visa Intelligent Commerce portfolio, which also includes payment credentials and controls. The comparison below sticks to what each network has published.
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Both networks want AI agents to transact on a cardholder's behalf without being blocked as bots or creating fraud. Mastercard leads with a new token type for agents. Visa leads with a signed identity protocol for merchants, and handles payment credentials elsewhere in its agentic portfolio. The table sets out the published differences.

Mastercard builds agent payments on its tokenization stack, so an agent carries a network token tied to a registered agent. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol does not issue a payment token. It attaches cryptographic signatures to agent requests so merchants can verify the agent before and during checkout.
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Per Mastercard's Agent Pay release, the program introduces Mastercard Agentic Tokens, which build on the tokenization behind contactless, card-on-file and Payment Passkeys, and requires AI agents to be registered and verified before they pay. The Agent Pay product page says only registered agents can transact, governed and traceable with Mastercard network tokens.
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Per Visa's October 14, 2025 release, Trusted Agent Protocol was developed with Cloudflare, is built on the HTTP Message Signature standard and aligned with Web Bot Auth, and passes three kinds of information: agent intent, consumer recognition, and optional payment information. It is an add-on within Visa Intelligent Commerce, not a separate merchant-of-record model.
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Mastercard puts consumer control into the agent credential itself: the consumer decides what the agent may buy, and the network can flag agent-initiated transactions. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol is about telling the merchant who the agent is and what it intends. Consumer spending controls sit in other parts of Visa Intelligent Commerce.
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Per Mastercard, consumers will have complete control over what the agent is allowed to purchase, and every player in the chain can recognise agent-facilitated transactions. Per Visa, Visa Intelligent Commerce embeds payment credentials, controls, authentication and protections into automated buying. Neither network publishes a signed per-transaction intent with the agent acting as merchant of record.
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Google's Agent Payments Protocol adds a network-neutral layer for consent, using an Intent Mandate and a signed record of exact items and price, per Google Cloud. We cover it in our AP2 protocol explainer.
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For merchants, Agent Pay works inside existing card acceptance: agent transactions arrive as tokenized Mastercard payments that can be recognised as agent-initiated. Trusted Agent Protocol asks merchants to verify agent signatures, which Visa describes as needing minimal changes to websites or checkout pages and no code for merchants.
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Per Mastercard, Agent Pay payments can be conducted at millions of merchants supporting online commerce today, and Mastercard works with Braintree and Checkout.com to extend tokenization they already use. Per Visa, Trusted Agent Protocol uses existing web infrastructure with minimal UX changes, and its specifications are available in the Visa Developer Center and on GitHub. See our Agent Pay developer guide for implementation steps.
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Google's Agent Payments Protocol is a separate, open standard for agent payments. Mastercard appears in Google's named partner list for the announcement. Visa does not appear in that named list. AP2 does not replace either network's program, and it does not by itself route a payment over a card network.
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Google's AP2 announcement on September 16, 2025 says it is collaborating with more than 60 organizations and names partners including Adyen, American Express, Coinbase, Mastercard, PayPal and Worldpay. Visa is not among the companies named there. Visa says it is working so Trusted Agent Protocol complements other protocols such as the Agentic Commerce Protocol and Coinbase's x402, per Visa.
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Neither agent program is itself a stablecoin product, but both networks now offer stablecoin access next to their agent work. Both are integration paths for Open USD, a dollar stablecoin governed by a partner consortium. Visa runs that access through its Visa Stablecoin Platform, and Mastercard through its own API and portal.
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Per Open Standard, Mastercard offers API or portal access for buying, selling, sending, receiving and settling Open USD, and Visa offers APIs via the Visa Stablecoin Platform. Per Visa, that platform supports wallets on Ethereum, Solana and Tempo, with API access coming soon. For cross-chain USDC mechanics see CCTP cross-chain transfers.
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The choice depends on which side of the transaction you build. Agent builders who need to pay with cards should look at Agent Pay and Visa Intelligent Commerce credentials. Merchants worried about blocking good agents or letting bad bots through should look at Trusted Agent Protocol first, since that is its specific job.
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Agent Pay requires agents to be registered and verified, per Mastercard. Trusted Agent Protocol is available to developers in the Visa Developer Center and on GitHub, per Visa. Both rest on verifiable agent identity, which our agent identity verification guide walks through.
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Both programs are still being rolled out, and neither network has published a date for matching features. Visa notes its Intelligent Commerce product is still in the process of deployment. Watch for public merchant counts, issuer participation, and whether either network adds its programs to open standards bodies.
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Visa states that Intelligent Commerce is currently in the process of deployment and may not contain every feature described. Visa also says it plans to align Trusted Agent Protocol with standards bodies such as IETF, OpenID Foundation and EMVCo, per Visa. Claims of feature parity between the networks should be treated as unconfirmed until either publishes it.
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This comparison relies only on primary pages from Mastercard, Visa, Google and Open Standard, fetched on the same day. Where a feature was not described by the network itself, it was left out rather than inferred. Earlier versions of this article contained architecture claims that the networks' own pages do not support.
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Sources, fetched October 6, 2026: Mastercard Agent Pay release, Mastercard Agent Pay, Visa Trusted Agent Protocol release, Visa Intelligent Commerce, Visa Stablecoin Platform, Google Cloud AP2 announcement, Open Standard.
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