As AI agents continue to grow in popularity, one question everybody is wondering: When will they reach full autonomy? A recently launched foundation is betting on soon.
In September, Cloudflare and Coinbase introduced the x402 Foundation, which supports the open payment standard x402. The protocol, named after the HTTP 402 payment required status code, is a payment standard for online-based exchanges, paving a path for digital dollars to become a viable currency and opening up the possibility for agents to be outfitted with wallets so that they can make autonomous payments.
The open standard also enables individuals or organizations with online-based services such as API developers or content creators, where the revenue paradigm has been turned upside down by large language models and features such as AI Overview, an opportunity to charge for their products.
“Businesses are now starting to adopt x402 because [agents are] scraping … contents,” said Dan Kim, vice president of digital asset listings and services at Coinbase. He added that having the agent as part of the standard is a benefit to content creators, but it also allows users to purchase products online without having to expose their credit card number.
Options currently exist that enable generative AI systems to make purchases on behalf of users such as ChatGPT Shopping or ChatGPT Instant Checkout, but Kim pointed out that a human has to be in the loop and that these systems are built around credit cards, which can be compromised.
Digital dollars or stablecoins, on the other hand, introduce a payment form that currently circumvents payment fees and chargebacks.
“It’s not just about, ‘Hey, I can do this with credit cards.’ It’s like, ‘Well, what can’t you do with credit cards and what can you do with digital dollars that is going to make that experience a lot more interesting, a lot more powerful, a lot more engaging, a lot more scalable in a world where people are already going to search engines a lot less, and going to ChatGPT or Gemini as their default,” Kim said. “This is not just to be able to buy things, but to be able to allow agents to become autonomous buyers and sellers in a world where humans don’t actually have to be in a loop and shouldn’t have to be in a loop.”
Kim pointed to an example of trip planning. If he interfaces with a large language model to develop an itinerary, he then has to take the extra steps to book the flight or the hotel and might miss out on whatever deal AI surfaced. The experience would be wholly different if Kim could instruct an agent to make payments on his behalf, he said.
However, even without credit cards, the risks of having agents work on human behalf are high, which is why there’s a need for a trusted agent registry and platforms such as AWS where developers are building agents they can trust, Kim said.
“What’s needed in order for this agentic economy to really flourish is not just the technology that exists, but the idea of this AI registry, where as an operator or owner operator of a site or owner of content, you, say, ‘Look, I’ll serve agents, either selling my goods or my data, but they need to be trusted,'” he said. “It’s growing, but does that exist today? No, not yet. But it’s happening.”