AI Agents can not make payments on your behalf using “Stablecoins.”

…What could go wrong?

The 402 Payment Required status code has been around for a long time, and I am glad someone finally put it to use.

What better way to use it than to fend off armies of AI agents stealing your precious content and regurgitating it as if it were their own ideas by charging them a small fee?

This theoretically can be done with the use of the x402 protocol.

A protocol that AWS Agent Core seems to have gone all in on.

I know I throw a lot of shade at AI Agents/LLMs being overused, but I am bullish on the technology on a long enough time line, as long as it is being used strategically and not shoehorned into every aspect of every product.

I haven’t really spoken out on crypto, but as a technology, I love it; as an investment device, I am a lot more skeptical.

Maybe it’s just me, but giving AI Agents, which don’t have a great track record of decision making, the ability to spend a currency that is so volatile they need to slap the word “stable” to the front of it to get people to think it’s not a ponzi scheme seems a little risky…

Don’t get me wrong, if I had a website with content interesting enough that agents wanted to pay me to access the content, I would take the payment in whatever form they are willing to pay me in.

With that said, I would be curious what your thoughts are on this?

What could possibly go wrong?