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- AWS Bedrock AgentCore Payments is an agentic payment system for micropayments
- Coinbase and Stripe are the first partners to support payments that can be less than one cent
- Amazon also knows that agents will be making bigger payments for humans soon
AI agents will soon be able to make payments on your behalf using stablecoins thanks to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments, launched in preview through a partnership with Coinbase and Stripe.
The company explained in a blog post how the emerging system is being designed for a future in which AI agents can pay for web content, APIs, MCP servers and other agents.
"Services, tools, and content must be designed for humans and agents," the company declared.
Agents in Bedrock will soon be able to make payments autonomously
Described as the "first managed end-to-end payment" system for agents, AWS built the payment infrastructure with Coinbase and Stripe as wallet infrastructure and payment rail providers, using Coinbase's x402 protocol which is increasingly popular across machine-to-machine payments, however the company is also advertising that further partners and protocols will be supported soon.
AWS also drew attention to rising micropayments for accessing APIs, MCP servers, web content and other agents, which can be fractions of a cent and are being fuelled by emerging consumption-based models.
"There will soon be more AI agents transacting than humans, and they need money that’s built for the internet – programmable, always on, and global," Coinbase Head of Infrastructure Growth and Strategy Brian Foster explained.
"For agents to become meaningful economic actors, they need a way to hold and spend money," Privy's CEO Henri Stern added. "That’s why we’re excited to partner with AWS to make stablecoin wallets for agents readily available to AgentCore developers.”
While Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments is launching primarily with a focus on micropayments, AWS is predicting a future in which agents can also transact on behalf of human users, such as booking flights or buying products from online merchants.
AWS says it'll continue to build out additional protocols, stronger buyer intent verification and end-to-end transaction lifecycle observability to support rising agentic payments going forward.
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