Why AI Agents Fail at Paid APIs (and How We Fixed 402 Payments)

AI agents can browse, reason, and call APIs. But they can’t pay. That sounds like a small limitation — but it breaks a surprising number of real-world use cases. The problem: 402 Payment Required If you’ve built APIs for agents, you’ve probably run into this: HTTP / 1.1 402 Payment Required The idea is simple: your API charges per request the client needs to pay before continuing This works fine for humans. It doesn’t work for agents. When an agent hits a paid endpoint: it can’t authorize a paym