Cloudflare unveils tool to charge AI agents in USDC stablecoin

Cloudflare announced tools on Wednesday that will let businesses charge AI agents in USDC, Circle's dollar-pegged stablecoin. The tools are part of Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway, a payment system for AI agents. The gateway is in closed beta for eligible U.S.-based buyers and sellers and is not yet available to the broader public. The gateway will let an AI agent pay a small fee each time it accesses an online service without a person entering card details or signing up for a monthly subscription. Cloudflare will present a price when an agent requests information or a service from a website and grant access once the payment clears. The gateway uses Coinbase's x402 payment standard to verify payments. USDC transactions settle on Base, Coinbase's blockchain network. The gateway builds on Cloudflare's August rollout of cloudflare.pay, which lets AI agents prove they are acting on a user's behalf and spend from a linked wallet. Cloudflare product manager Rohin Lohe said the company will add features and users through the rest of the year and plans to make the tool widely available by early 2027. In an essay published in July, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire envisioned AI agents increasingly conducting transactions for people and businesses using stablecoins as programmable money. The essay, titled "The Agentic Economy," was roughly 18,000 words long. Last month, MoonPay integrated its AI-enabled payment and wallet tool into Grok, X's chatbot. In May, Robinhood said customers could use AI agents to make purchases on their behalf with the Robinhood Gold credit card. Circle, Stripe and Tempo have also announced tools intended to let AI agents hold funds or make payments. In April 2025, Visa unveiled tools that let AI agents shop and pay for users without giving merchants their actual card numbers. That same month, Mastercard announced a program that lets verified agents make purchases within limits set by users.