The Internet Just Got a Payment Layer. Who Decides What Agents Are Allowed to Buy?

22 companies just standardized how AI agents pay for things. Nobody standardized who's allowed to say no. Earlier this month, the x402 Foundation launched under the Linux Foundation. Twenty-two founding members — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, AWS, Google, Microsoft, Stripe, Coinbase, Cloudflare, Shopify, Solana Foundation, and eleven others — agreed on a single thing: how AI agents pay for resources on the internet. The protocol is elegant. An agent requests a resource. The server responds