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Linux Foundation's Latest Foray Is To Standardize Internet-Native Payments For AI Agents (phoronix.com)

(Tuesday July 14, 2026 @05:00PM (BeauHD) from the next-gen-payments dept.)


Today, the Linux Foundation [1]launched the x402 Foundation to [2]standardize internet-native payments for AI agents, APIs, and applications , based on Coinbase's [3]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, [4]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."



[1] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-operational-launch-of-x402-foundation-to-standardize-internet-native-payments-for-ai-agents-and-applications

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Foundation-x402

[3] https://slashdot.org/story/26/06/11/1849202/coinbase-launches-tool-to-let-ai-agents-manage-trading-and-payments

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/11/coinbase-launches-tool-to-let-ai-agents-manage-trading-and-payments.html


Reason AI agents want "access to money" (Score:2)

by VampireByte ( 447578 )

I'm guessing that "pretty much anything on the internet" will mostly be consumption of pr*n.

Re: (Score:3)

by Himmy32 ( 650060 )

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.

Re: (Score:2)

by jhoegl ( 638955 )

Plenty of people predicted it, have you not read or seen "Ready Player One"?

Re: (Score:2)

by outsider007 ( 115534 )

Substitute Lucky Dragon for Amazon and it's also every William Gibson story

Nothing bad will come of this (Score:2)

by haruchai ( 17472 )

right? RIGHT??

Re: (Score:2)

by ffkom ( 3519199 )

Yep, running lots of bots with the primary directive to just make as much money as possible cannot possibly go wrong.

HTTP ??? (Score:1)

by fredex ( 146162 )

HTTP instead of HTTPS???????????

Whyever?

Stupid (Score:2)

by exa ( 27197 )

blah

1st use! (Score:2)

by Fly Swatter ( 30498 )

Money laundering, charge XX Megawatts of compute, quietly use none of it.

Internet-Native you say? sure they didn't misspell Naive?

I have an idea (Score:3)

by CEC-P ( 10248912 )

Name it Copyright Violation Coin and put it on the blockchain! Btw, AI agents are the most gullible things I have ever seen, except the scrapers that grab the data are even worse. Not only do they suffer from nonstop version confusion, quoting 5 different steps to fix an HP printer from 5 different generations that had 5 different menu structures, but they're susceptible to "ai tar pit traps." Now imagine it's one you charge for. And per-page it has an AI generating fake-ish data for the other AI to scrape. This will not work!

Giving your bot an allowance... (Score:2)

by silentbozo ( 542534 )

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.

[1]https://spellboundproductions.... [substack.com]

"Thirty years ago, Ge

[1] https://spellboundproductions.substack.com/p/back-to-the-future

Let's re-write that headline, shall we? (Score:2)

by nightflameauto ( 6607976 )

"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

Re: (Score:2)

by smooth wombat ( 796938 )

*ensure*

I Don't Understand (Score:2)

by SlashbotAgent ( 6477336 )

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.

You will not be elected to public office this year.