Mastercard & Lobster.cash team up for AI agent payments

Lobster.cash plans to integrate Mastercard Agent Pay and Verifiable Intent for AI agent transactions, allowing Mastercard cardholders on OpenClaw to authorise agents to pay with their existing cards.

The integration connects Lobster.cash, a payments product built by Crossmint, with Mastercard's agent-focused payment tools and a verification framework that records a user's approval for each transaction. Basis Theory will provide the credential layer.

Under the planned setup, OpenClaw cardholders will be able to let AI agents make purchases on their behalf without sharing card details directly with the agent. Each payment will remain subject to issuer controls and Mastercard network authentication, while a cryptographic record links the transaction to the user's stated intent.

Mastercard Agent Pay will first be made available to OpenClaw agents through Lobster.cash, before expanding to other agent platforms supported by the service. Lobster.cash already works across platforms, including OpenClaw, Claude Code, Devin, Hermes and Zo Computer.

Growing market

The move reflects a broader effort by payments companies and software providers to solve a central problem in agentic commerce: how to enable software to act on behalf of a user without weakening security or oversight. As AI agents take on more shopping, booking and software purchasing tasks, payment providers are building controls that mirror those used for consumer card payments.

OpenClaw has become one of the larger open-source projects in the sector, with more than one million agents deployed across more than 20 messaging platforms, according to the company. That scale gives Mastercard and Crossmint a way into a fast-growing part of the AI software market, where payment rules have often been set by individual developers or platform operators rather than card networks and issuers.

Lobster.cash is designed to let users set limits on what an agent can spend, where it can spend, when it can pay and which payment method it can use. Adding Mastercard's systems is intended to bring established card network controls into those settings.

Intent records

A key part of the arrangement is Mastercard's Verifiable Intent framework, which creates tamper-resistant records showing who authorised an agent, under what conditions and within what limits.

Mastercard developed Verifiable Intent in partnership with Google, and the framework aligns with the Agent Payments Protocol and the Universal Commerce Protocol. The aim is to give issuers, merchants and platforms a way to independently verify that a transaction remained within the scope approved by the user.

That is especially important in open agent ecosystems, where software agents may operate across multiple services and channels. A shared record of authorisation could help settle disputes, support audit trails and give card issuers clearer visibility into automated purchases made in a customer's name.

Financial institutions, including Santander, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, DBS and UOB have already implemented Mastercard Agent Pay. The integration with Lobster.cash extends that infrastructure into developer-led agent environments.

"Mastercard Agent Pay is one of the most trusted payment infrastructures designed for agentic commerce in the world. Bringing it to lobster.cash means agent users don't need a new wallet or a new card," said Alfonso Gómez-Jordana Mañas, co-founder of Crossmint. "They can put the card they already have to work for their agent, with the security and control they expect from Mastercard. This is how agentic payments reach everyone."

The model is intended to preserve existing card relationships rather than require consumers to move funds into a separate wallet. For users, this could lower a practical barrier to adopting AI-driven purchasing tools. For banks, it keeps transactions within the card network rules and monitoring systems.

For developers, the appeal lies in the ability to plug into a recognised payments framework rather than designing payment permissions and credentials from scratch. For issuers and merchants, the focus is on maintaining traceability and control when a transaction is initiated by software rather than directly by a human.

"Mastercard Agent Pay was built to bring trust and accountability to every agentic transaction," said Pablo Fourez, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard. "By integrating with lobster.cash, we're extending Mastercard's trusted payments network and infrastructure to open agent platforms, enabling developers to innovate while ensuring consumers and issuers retain the same security and control they expect from Mastercard."