An Open Standards Organization (OSO) for AI proxy payments has become fully operational. x402 Foundation, supported by the Linux Foundation system, aims to embed capacity to pay in a common Internet protocol that allows AI agents, machines and users to complete transactions directly via the network.
40 institutions joined
The first core members include Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and Circle, MoonPay, Ripple, Solana Foundation and Stella Development Foundation.
This project is built around the 402 protocol. The agreement was originally driven by Coinbase, with the name “402 Payment Required” status code in the early web architecture. The project seeks to use HTTP, an Internet-based basic communication language, to allow online payments to take place as raw as information transfers, to reduce subscriptions, manual input of bank card information, etc.
The goal is for the agent to make a direct deal.
Participants were of the view that AI agents might assume a significant share of Internet transactions in the future and that there would be a large number of small payment scenarios. x402 Foundation is conceived to allow different modes of payment and competition agencies to collaborate under the same set of open standards, rather than to establish closed systems each.
Alin Dragos, Senior Manager of AWS Payments and President of the Board of Directors of x402 Foundation, stated that the Internet had solved the problem of information exchange, but that there was still a lack of uniform and open standards for value exchange. He said that the establishment of standards required the participation of multiple competitors and multiple payment modalities, and that neutral organizations could provide a space for collaboration to that end.
The CEO of Stellar Development Foundation, Denelle Dixon, also stated that the problem of closed structures could be more pronounced when the Internet had been heavily concentrated in content and traffic at an early stage because of closed ecology. In her view, open payment standards offered an opportunity to change the current web business model that relied on subscriptions and advertising.
The Foundation has established technical committees
Currently, X402 Foundation is in the process of recruiting executive directors and a technical steering committee has been established. For its part, the Board stated that the Foundation had become fully operational some three months after its inception and that its membership continued to grow.
In terms of participation, the project covers both traditional card organizations, payment companies, cloud service providers, encryption enterprises and the Public Chain Foundation. If the relevant standards are adopted more widely, a uniform interface between AI agents for content payments, service calls and automated settlements may evolve.
At this stage, however, the agreement is still in its early stages of advancement. The participants considered that the block chain already provided a bottom-up infrastructure for network payments and that the spread of AI agents might allow such payment standards to begin to be used in practice.