Agents can pay. They can't prove they were supposed to.

On May 7, AWS launched AgentCore Payments in preview. Coinbase x402 plus Stripe. Agents can now purchase APIs, MCP servers, paywalled content, and data feeds mid-task, executing through payment rails without interrupting their reasoning loop. The system handles protocol negotiation, retries, and settlement automatically. That's the payment problem solved. Production-grade. Backed by Coinbase, Stripe, and the card network infrastructure underneath both. Which makes the other problem harder to ign