Some services now charge per use, often a fraction of a cent, and they want the agent itself to pay. Traditional payment systems have minimum transaction costs that make such tiny payments inefficient. Payments lets an agent pay these tiny amounts automatically with stablecoin, using the open x402 standard, inside spending limits you set, so it can buy data or content on the fly without you building a payment system. This is real money, not LLM tokens.
New to these words? Read chapter 02 "Key terms" (x402, tool, MCP). Note: in preview.Payments lets your agent pay for paid APIs, MCP servers, and content on its own, in tiny amounts (microtransactions, often in cents). It uses stablecoin and the open x402 protocol instead of traditional payment rails, whose minimum costs make sub-cent payments inefficient. You set the budgets; AgentCore handles the wallet, the signing, and the proof of payment.
The agent calls a paid endpoint.
The service replies "Payment Required" with a price.
AgentCore signs a stablecoin payment from the wallet, within your budget.
It sends cryptographic proof of payment back to the service.
The service accepts and returns the content. The agent retries automatically.
An embedded crypto wallet (the "instrument"), funded by the user, that the agent pays from.
CoinbaseCDP or Stripe (Privy). Its keys are kept safe in AgentCore Identity.
A budget plus a time limit. When either runs out, payments stop.
The managed plumbing that links it all to the provider.