Amazon Web Services (AWS) has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and global payment company Stripe to unveil 'AgentCore Payments,' a payment infrastructure dedicated to AI agents. This is being interpreted as the beginning of an era where AI autonomously calls APIs and web services and even pays expenses using stablecoins.
The core of this service is 'autonomous payment by AI agents.' While existing AI services required users to directly pay subscription fees or settle API usage, going forward, the AI will be able to directly purchase necessary data, call external services, and make payments. Simply put, it is a structure where AI performs economic activities in place of humans.
To this end, AWS adopted Coinbase's x402 protocol and stablecoin payment infrastructure. x402 is an attempt to embed payment functionality into the internet protocol itself, designed to enable AI to automatically pay API usage fees without the need for separate registration or card input.
In particular, the use of stablecoins as a payment method is attracting market attention. While card payment networks are inefficient for microtransactions in the cent range due to their fee structure, stablecoins are evaluated as suitable for 'micro-payments' in the AI era because they enable immediate settlement on an on-chain basis.
The industry views this announcement not merely as the addition of a payment function, but as the beginning of the 'Agentic Economy' era. This is because there is a growing possibility that AI will evolve beyond simply generating answers into an economic entity that purchases data, leases cloud resources, and even conducts transactions with other AI services.
AWS explained that it designed the system to enable AI agents to access web content, MCP servers, SaaS services, and other AI agents to perform transactions in real time. By integrating wallet technology from Stripe's Privy, it even provides features for setting spending limits and permissions per AI.
This aligns with the stablecoin strategies that global big tech companies and the financial sector have recently been competitively pursuing. Global payment companies such as Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Stripe are expanding their related businesses, viewing stablecoins as the next-generation internet payment infrastructure. With AWS joining the fray, analysts suggest that the possibility has increased for stablecoins to transcend the simple cryptocurrency market and establish themselves as a core financial layer of the AI and cloud economy.
The market anticipates that this collaboration will have a positive impact on the expansion of the Coinbase and USDC ecosystems in the long term. This is because as AI agent transactions increase, the usage of stablecoins is likely to naturally rise as well.
In particular, this case is expected to have a significant impact on the stablecoin strategies of domestic financial institutions and big tech companies in the future. This is because, while discussions on Korean Won stablecoins and AI payment infrastructure are gaining momentum domestically, the global market has already entered a competition for a "structure where AI directly spends money."
Industry analysts suggest that “the core of the future internet could be AI, not humans,” and that “ultimately, whoever secures the payment networks used by AI will be the key to the new platform competition.”
