Linux Foundation's Latest Foray Is To Standardize Internet-Native Payments For AI Agents (phoronix.com) 26
Today, the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize internet-native payments for AI agents, APIs, and applications, based on Coinbase's contributed x402 protocol. Backed by companies including AWS, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, the effort aims to make payments work directly over HTTP (assuming users are comfortable letting AI agents handle financial transactions).
"The whole idea is to give agents access to money and, through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet," Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC last month when the company announced the protocol. "In the 2010s, every internet company dealt with the transition from desktop and web into a mobile environment. And now in the late 2020s, we're seeing the exact same thing happen where agents are going to be the new primary economic actors on the internet."
"The whole idea is to give agents access to money and, through that financial independence, improve their set of capabilities to pretty much anything on the internet," Lincoln Murr, Coinbase's AI product lead, told CNBC last month when the company announced the protocol. "In the 2010s, every internet company dealt with the transition from desktop and web into a mobile environment. And now in the late 2020s, we're seeing the exact same thing happen where agents are going to be the new primary economic actors on the internet."
Reason AI agents want "access to money" (Score:2)
I'm guessing that "pretty much anything on the internet" will mostly be consumption of pr*n.
Re:Reason AI agents want "access to money" (Score:4, Interesting)
The future no one predicted is when Claude buys you lube paid in Crypto to delivered by Amazon drone when he sees you open your browser. It's weird that with something like OpenClaw that something like this isn't a joke anymore.
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Substitute Lucky Dragon for Amazon and it's also every William Gibson story
We had that a decade ago (Score:2)
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Important part of the story; the fix to the problem of the father was to add pages about wine and other non-baby stuff to the baby leaflet so that nobody realized that they had been targeted for baby stuff.
We must be really careful that we target the problem, not the symptoms of the problem.
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Im more wondering if we're gonna start seeing clankers ordering "Victorias secret vacuum cleaners" catalogues getting orders in the mail leading to claude-bots in raincoats atendending seedy industrial machinery video screenings at 2am in the bad part of town.
"grease me daddy."
Nothing bad will come of this (Score:2)
right? RIGHT??
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HTTP ??? (Score:1)
HTTP instead of HTTPS???????????
Whyever?
Stupid (Score:2)
blah
1st use! (Score:2)
Internet-Native you say? sure they didn't misspell Naive?
I have an idea (Score:3)
Giving your bot an allowance... (Score:2)
This reminds me of microtransactions.
We're 50 years overdue for an alternate payment clearing system that doesn't take more to process than the payment is worth. Most of the enshittification we've seen due to an eyeball (now attention) based economy could have been sidestepped if we built a system for people to pay on a transactional basis for compute and content.
Funny how the wave of autonomous agents is once again driving people to revisit this stuff.
https://spellboundproductions.... [substack.com]
"Thirty years ago, Ge
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The blockchain is to know which person once owned the coin, that is all.
Not sure if that is an ridiculous overhead.
Otherwise I agree with you.
The first time I went into a business via a web site where I wanted to use "microtransactions", I wanted to sell stuff for 50cents. The fee was $2,30 per transaction.
No idea how that is in our days, Germany just introduced a new payment platform that is supposed to be fee free ... lets see.
Let's re-write that headline, shall we? (Score:2)
"Linux Foundation Helping Insure Money Can Still Be Made on Internet When Humans Have No Money."
That's all this is. The tech companies want to be sure they can continue to earn even when normies have no spending money available to them. The dream has always been to find a way to profit without having to rely on pesky fleshbags for it. The dream is almost realized. I didn't realize anything labeled Linux would be helping to make that happen, but I suppose they want to find a way to survive the coming economi
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*ensure*
I Don't Understand (Score:2)
I don't understand why I might want this.
I don't understand why the named players are interested in this.
I don't understand why anyone trusts Coinbase and the shit it proclaims.
I don't understand why anyone would turn an AI loose with their money.
"improve their set of capabilities" (Score:2)
So what? You're expecting me to give you access to my money so that you can pay for the shit product you've built? GTFO.
So like... (Score:2)
an Alexa on steroids that can order things from anywhere instead of only Amazon. I suppose I can *sort of* see how or why some people might want something like this. Provide a shopping list to the AI agent along with various preferences and it could go search for the best prices (or delivery time or whatever metric you set), set the delivery up, and then pay. The paying and delivery details are easy - if browsers can autofill that info, an AI can definitely input tokenized versions. The hardest parts would
What does this have to do with Linux (Score:1)
Look at the list of company names. (Score:2)
Linux has been hijacked by money for a while now. See systemd for details.