Training Data
“Training Data” – a cartoon showing how giving agents the ability to make payment decisions will require training them to act more responsibly than humans.
The internet was never designed for money. Marc Andreessen called it the “original sin” — the failure to embed seamless, native payments into the web. Instead, we got ads and tracking as the dominant business models. Today, we’re still living with that mistake. ChatGPT has 700 million users. Almost none have spent a cent through it. AI can write code and book flights, but when it hits a paywall, it stops. It can’t transact.
That’s finally starting to change. Coinbase and Cloudflare have revived HTTP 402 with a new protocol called x402. It lets any website ask for payment, and lets machines respond. Other efforts like ATXP and AP2 are working on letting agents authorize and complete payments between each other.
Stablecoins are becoming the default money for this machine-to-machine economy. They’re programmable, auditable, and better suited to fast, small payments than credit cards. But there’s a deeper risk. We’re training AI agents to act like humans. That sounds responsible. But it might just teach them to spam, scam, and manipulate at scale. Fraud becomes frictionless.
We need a better model. Blockchain can help, with transparent audit trails, persistent agent identity, and verifiable intent. Players like Privy (wallet access), Base (settlement layer), and Visa (tokenized credentials) are all working on parts of this stack. As Vicky Bindra, CEO of Trulioo, said, “Agentic commerce has significant potential, but it can only scale with trust built in from the start.” Giving agents the power to pay is a big step. Giving them values is the next one.
Sources:
Tony Bradley (Aug 26,, 2025) – Why Simplicity Is The Path To Trust For Agentic AI – Forbes
Tomer Elias (Jul 30, 2025) – AgenticTrust: The Trust Layer for Agentic Commerce in the AI Era – Human Security
Sage Lazzaro (Sep 03, 2025) – Agentic AI is the technology’s new frontier, and CAIOs are toiling to get agents implemented correctly – Fortune
