Cloudflare has just thrown down the gauntlet to traditional e-commerce. On October 14, the company announced partnerships with Visa, Mastercard and American Express. Their combined forces are working on the infrastructure for “agent commerce”, a model in which autonomous AI agents make purchases on our behalf.
Sounds like sci-fi? Soon, an AI agent will do your online shopping for you!
Cludflare makes it clear – stablecoin and onchain protocols are at the heart of the game
The San Francisco-based company, together with Visa, has developed the Trusted Agent Protocol, which allows sellers to authenticate AI shopping bots using the Web Bot Auth standard. Mastercard and American Express are implementing similar solutions in their AI commerce frameworks. Sound familiar? Because it is a natural step in the evolution of payments.
The announcement is part of Cloudflare’s broader strategy of building infrastructure for machine-to-machine transactions. The company recently announced its own stablecoin NET Dollar, and in cooperation with Coinbase it launched the x402 foundation to standardize payment protocols for agents.
Agent trading is a new class of transactions where AI agents autonomously search for, negotiate and purchase goods or services. Manage subscriptions, book flights – all without human intervention. The key to this ecosystem is digital assets, stablecoins and onchain protocols. Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said earlier this year that he hopes for “a trillion AI agents” using Bitcoin and USDT within 15 years. This fusion of AI and crypto is at the heart of Cloudflare’s strategy. Autonomous AI agents need programmable money – instant, secure, digital.
The future of commerce is agent-based, and Cloudflare is building a trusted foundation for it
– said Stephanie Cohen, CSO of the company.
Industry consensus
In addition to the payment giants, the following companies cooperated: Adyen, Checkout.com, Circle, Fiserv, Microsoft, Nuvei, Shopify, Webflow and Worldpay. This is a signal that the industry is taking autonomous transactions seriously. The question is no longer “if”, but “when” AI agents will take over our wallets. Cloudflare is betting it will be sooner rather than later.
It is also worth noting that the AI agent from OpenAI is already able to make purchases for the user – interestingly, the first tests among users showed that this particular agent (called Operator by OpenAI) tends to choose the most expensive items. Therefore, such autonomous purchases may save the user time, but there is a risk that the account balance will become dangerously low. On the other hand, you can always blame the purchase of more BTC hats or console games on the AI Agent later 😉
