AI Payment Standardization Foundation Launches with 40 Companies Including Visa

A new industry organization has been established to standardize autonomous payments by AI agents. The foundation is responsible for promoting and managing a payment protocol called 'x402', with 40 companies and organizations as members, including Visa, Mastercard, Google, and Microsoft.

The background is the rapid proliferation of AI agents. An AI agent is software that performs tasks autonomously while receiving human instructions, and can execute actions such as web searches, reservations, and purchases on behalf of humans. As these autonomous AIs become more prevalent, the question of "how AI will make payments" has emerged as an industry challenge. Currently, each service implements payment processing using its own mechanisms, and there is no common specification connecting AI and payment systems.

The x402 protocol managed by this foundation is positioned as a common framework that AI agents can use to access various services and pay for content and functionality. Participating companies include card companies with global payment networks and tech companies operating major cloud and AI platforms, structured as industry-wide collaboration.

What is noteworthy is that this initiative goes beyond mere technical standardization. The participation of companies like Visa and Mastercard, which have existing financial infrastructure, opens the path for payments by AI agents to connect with real financial systems. Once a standard protocol is established, developers can avoid the effort of building individual payment integrations from scratch, potentially reducing AI service development costs.

However, whether the standardization effort will actually permeate the entire industry depends on the expansion of participating companies and the speed of implementation. A scale of 40 companies carries certain weight as a starting point, but the industry must monitor future developments for consensus across the entire sector. The trend of AI agents becoming deeply embedded in commerce is advancing in various sectors, and how the payment structure serving as its foundation is designed is positioned as a key factor influencing the future shape of AI services.

As autonomous economic activity by AI expands, demand for a payment infrastructure with reliability, compatibility, and security is expected to grow. This foundation's movement can also be seen as an effort to seize the initiative in establishing infrastructure standards within this trend. Going forward, attention will focus on the expansion of participating companies, the implementation status of the protocol, and how regulatory authorities will treat payments made by AI agents.