Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not).

So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with.

I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc).

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At what point can I sue these companies for obviously failing to act in my interests?

Because that's the clear next step here.

Basically - where is the fiduciary duty that I would require for a real working relationship?

Because otherwise these agents can and will prefer to access payment gated resources that have financial relationships with their operators or developers.

I don't even care anymore, AI stealing the life out of everything, or Cloudflare trying to become so global internet gatekeeper, let them kill each other.

The most likely scenario is Stripe, or someone similar, creating an agentic API connected to the agent owner linked account or something along those lines. I am not sure how this would work with 3DS, or whether it would be acceptable at all, since these kinds of transactions could be disputed easily ("I did not make the purchase, my rogue agent did.")

Another way to handle payments on the internet is obviously not to reinvent the wheel and simply email a payment link to the owner. That seems simple enough to me and does not require additional infrastructure. Payment processed, mint a key, the agent is allowed to proceed.

Apparently I missed this initiative. It seems like it is a technology that is intended to be open an universal while also being supported and developed primarily by US companies (Linux Foundation, Coinbase, CloudFlare.)

I guess I don't understand who this is for. If you want your worldview reflected in the latest generations of models, you probably wouldn't use this. If you don't want your worldview reflected in the models, why would a few pennies change your mind?

Oh boy!

In the future, an AGEnt will attest that you are old enough to access the resource.

This could also make abusing use / DDoS attack very costly

I expect much more of this type of thing going forward.

So far, I'm having trouble figuring out how to get that out of x402.

I think the difficult part is that LLMs are gullible and it will absolutely be gamed if any real money can be made this way.

It would be nice if this became a viable alternative to paywalls, though.

Ah yes, the starry-eyed dream of early web pioneers is finally upon us: a soulless internet filled with soulless agents and microtransactions!

But in all seriousness, it's hard to deny that the attention-based model that has propelled the web forward for the last 30 years is somewhat falling apart. And I don't have, nor have I come across, any meaningful solutions that could realistically work better. So maybe it's just time we turn off this 'internet' thing and call it a day.

Stablecoins doesn't make sense here and prefer not to use crypto at all.

Unless there's a privacy-preserving way this can be used to send money, then it's just another chunk of the surveillance state that's being rapidly erected over the last few years. The word "privacy" does not appear once in the article.

Even if it did, I'd be skeptical. If their payment system does allow money to be sent in a privacy and free speech preserving way, then it'll be used for money laundering.

This whole "agents bad" framing is complete BS. It's the reality of how people use the internet now, and, frankly, ad blockers have been a thing since forever. On the other hand, if successful, this infrastructure will give Cloudflare centralized control over internet publishing and also centralized surveillance of all users with no opt out.

Piracy is looking better and better. So does the small web. Come to think of it, the library does too. Any good solutions for non-destructively scanning books?