Amazon Teams With Coinbase and Stripe to Let AI Agents Pay With Stablecoins

In brief

• Amazon Web Services launched AgentCore Payments with Coinbase and Stripe for AI agent transactions.
• The system uses Coinbase’s x402 protocol and USDC stablecoin payments on Base and Solana.
• Amazon says future AI agents could autonomously buy services, data, flights, and hotel bookings.

Amazon Web Services is bringing crypto payments into enterprise AI software as tech companies race to build autonomous AI agents capable of completing tasks and making transactions online.

On Thursday, AWS announced Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments, a system developed with Coinbase and Stripe that allows AI agents to use stablecoins to automatically pay for APIs, data feeds, web content, and other online services during task execution. The launch brings stablecoin-based micropayments directly into AWS’s AI agent platform, aiming to eliminate the need for developers to build custom billing systems for each service integration.

According to Preethi CN, director of AgentCore, the platform uses Coinbase’s x402 protocol, an open standard based on the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” response code, along with Coinbase wallet infrastructure and Stripe-owned Privy wallet technology.

“AgentCore is designed to work with any framework and any protocol. We’ve carried that same flexibility into Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments. Developers don’t have to track the evolving payment protocol landscape or lock into a single standard,” CN said in a statement.

Amazon plans to integrate additional protocols, and will further support emerging protocols “at the platform level so developers don’t have to rebuild their agents,” CN added. Once configured, agents can automatically pay for services during execution.

AWS said the initial release focuses on micropayments for APIs, AI tools, MCP servers, and paywalled content. The company said future versions could support broader commercial activity, including booking flights, reserving hotels, and completing purchases across merchant platforms.

In a separate announcement, Coinbase described the collaboration as one of the first times a major cloud provider has integrated crypto micropayments directly into enterprise AI infrastructure.

According to Coinbase, the x402 protocol has already processed more than 169 million machine-native payments across 590,000 buyers and 100,000 sellers. The company said transactions settle in roughly 200 milliseconds using USDC on Ethereum layer-2 network Base and Solana.

The announcement comes as tech and crypto companies increasingly push stablecoins as a payments infrastructure for AI agents. Stablecoins have gained traction because they settle quickly, operate around the clock, and support low-cost micropayments that traditional payment systems often handle poorly.

Last week, MoonPay launched a debit card that lets AI agents spend stablecoins at online merchants. And earlier this week, Solana and Google Cloud introduced a service allowing AI agents to pay for APIs and cloud services on a per-request basis using stablecoins.

However, not everyone agrees that stablecoins alone are the best option for AI-powered transactions. In March, a Bitcoin Policy Institute study found AI models often favored Bitcoin and stablecoins over fiat currencies in simulated economic scenarios.

“Enterprises have been telling us the same thing: They want agents that can transact, but they can't get past legal and compliance review,” Coinbase Head of Infrastructure Growth Brian Foster said in a statement. “AWS developers can now give their agents financial autonomy in a comprehensive managed solution. It just works."

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