Cloudflare teams up with Visa, Mastercard and AmEx to lay payment rails for AI agents

Cloudflare has expanded its push into AI-powered payments, announcing a collaboration with Visa, Mastercard, and American Express to secure the emerging “agentic commerce” economy where autonomous software agents shop and pay on behalf of humans.

The San Francisco–based connectivity cloud firm announced on Oct. 14 that it collaborated with Visa to develop the Trusted Agent Protocol, allowing merchants to authenticate AI shopping bots using Cloudflare’s Web Bot Auth standard.

Mastercard and American Express are adopting similar integrations to verify “trusted agents” within their own AI commerce frameworks, according to a press release.

Tuesday’s statement builds on Cloudflare’s broader strategy to create the infrastructure for machine-to-machine payments. The company recently announced plans for its NET Dollar stablecoin and, in partnership with Coinbase, launched the x402 Foundation to standardize agent payment protocols.

Agentic commerce refers to a new class of transactions where AI agents autonomously search, negotiate, and purchase goods or services. These systems could, for example, book travel or manage subscriptions, and are increasingly expected to utilize digital assets, stablecoins, and onchain protocols for settlement.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino told The Block earlier this year that he hopes for “one trillion AI agents” to use Bitcoin and USDT within 15 years. That convergence of AI and crypto lies at the heart of Cloudflare’s strategy. As AI agents gain financial autonomy, they’ll need programmable money that can move instantly and securely online.

“The future of commerce is agentic, and Cloudflare is building the trusted foundation for it,” said Stephanie Cohen, the firm’s chief strategy officer.

Beyond Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx, early collaborators include Adyen, Checkout.com, Circle, Fiserv, Microsoft, Nuvei, Shopify, Webflow, and Worldpay, signaling a broad industry effort to define standards for secure, autonomous transactions.

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