I learned about the future of AI agents today, how do agents autonomously pay for things in the new world we are moving into?

Google and Coinbase have partnered to bring the future of autonomous agents one step closer to reality. X402 will be a new protocol for agents to pay each other for services using stable coins.

Think of an agent calling lovable for a website design, then using Claude for the copy, finally Veo to create some video content and only paying for the amount of tokens it used rather than you paying the monthly fee to all 3.

You could set a budget for a project and send your agent off into the world to get it built, it’s a strange new reality but feels in line with the current trajectory of all of these tools.

This reality is a combination of Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Coinbase’s new X402 Protocol. This is similar to an MCP but for payments. It will be a new digital economy enabling seamless payments across tools.

No more trusting Agent mode with your bank details to make purchases bringing a new level of security and autonomy to the world of AI agents.

There’s still a lot of work to do to make it secure and reliable, Google themselves have released paper describing the potential problems, but this feels like we are building the infrastructure for that ‘take off’ moment.