The Linux Foundation has launched the x402 Foundation, which will manage an open payment standard that AI agents can use to pay automatically over HTTP. The protocol was built by Coinbase and is now supported by 40 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, and Google.
When AI agents eventually begin booking travel, shopping for goods, or purchasing computing power on their own behalf, they must also be able to settle their own bills. The internet has lacked a built-in way for programs to pay one another, and agents have had to rely on the same solutions as humans, with card logins or identity verifications disrupting an otherwise automated process. x402 is intended to close this gap by baking payments directly into communication between systems.
The x402 protocol was originally developed by Coinbase. In April this year, the Linux Foundation announced plans to establish a dedicated foundation to manage its future development, and on July 14, the x402 Foundation became formally operational under what is described as neutral, open governance. At the same time, Coinbase completed the transfer of the protocol to the foundation.
The standard builds payments directly into HTTP, the protocol websites and programs already use to talk to each other. This allows AI agents, APIs, and applications to send and receive payments as easily as they exchange data, with support for everything from traditional cards to stablecoins. Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, says that AI agents and automated systems are increasingly becoming active participants in the global economy, but they have lacked a secure, natural way to execute transactions—a need that the operational launch of the foundation is now set to address.
Among the foundation's so-called "premier" members are card networks Visa, Mastercard, and American Express; payment players Stripe, Adyen, and Fiserv; cloud providers Google and Amazon Web Services; as well as crypto companies such as Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Stellar Development Foundation, and the Solana Foundation. The e-commerce platform Shopify and content delivery network Cloudflare are also involved. The breadth of the membership, spanning from traditional card companies to crypto infrastructure, illustrates how many diverse players are now positioning themselves around payments for autonomous AI agents.
Without a shared framework, large tech companies risk building their own closed payment solutions for AI agents, meaning an agent built for one provider's ecosystem cannot seamlessly pay within another. With open governance under the Linux Foundation, small and large players theoretically stand on equal footing, and the protocol can be developed collaboratively rather than being owned by a single company. For a financial industry already experimenting with autonomous AI agents, x402 could become one of the building blocks that determines how quickly machine-to-machine payments are adopted on a large scale.
Sources: Linux Foundation
You have read what you can read for free. With an account you get unlimited access to all news and articles on kaupr.io — and become part of the network of investors, professionals and builders following onchain finance.