Amazon’s AgentCore Payments lets AWS AI agents transact autonomously on Base

Amazon just gave its AI agents a wallet. AWS’s AgentCore Payments feature, now generally available, lets AI agents running on the company’s infrastructure autonomously pay for APIs, web content, and even other agents’ services, settling transactions in USDC on Coinbase’s Layer 2 network, Base. The system integrates with both Coinbase’s Developer Platform wallets and Stripe’s Privy wallet infrastructure, using an open payment protocol called x402 to handle the actual money movement. Transactions settle in hundreds of milliseconds on Base, which makes the whole thing fast enough that an AI agent can pay for a data query mid-task without any meaningful delay. How it works under the hood The x402 protocol is essentially an HTTP-native payment layer. When an AI agent needs access to a paid API or premium content, it can negotiate and complete payment programmatically, no human required to pull out a credit card or approve a charge. Coinbase’s x402 Bazaar servers provide access to over 10,000 payable endpoints. That’s a substantial marketplace of services that AI agents can tap into on their own, from data feeds to specialized computation to content libraries. Traditional payment rails c...