Cloudflare Lets Businesses Bill AI Agents in Stablecoins

Cloudflare is giving AI agents a stablecoin expense account. On Wednesday, the cloud security firm announced tools—not yet available to the broader public—that let businesses charge AI agents in USDC, Circle's dollar-pegged stablecoin.

The product sits inside Cloudflare's broader push to build a payment system for autonomous software. The initiative, called the Monetization Gateway, lets an agent automatically pay a small fee each time it accesses an online service, rather than requiring a human to sign up for a monthly subscription or enter a credit card number. It is now in closed beta for eligible U.S.-based buyers and sellers.

"We'll be ramping up features and users through the rest of the year, with plans to be widely available by early 2027," Rohin Lohe, product manager at Cloudflare, told Fortune in an email.

The launch builds on an August rollout of cloudflare.pay, which lets AI agents prove they are acting on a user's behalf and spend from a linked wallet.

The mechanics are straightforward. Cloudflare's tool works as an intermediary between websites and the AI agents that visit them. When an agent requests information or a service, Cloudflare presents a price and grants access once the agent's payment clears. No person enters card details. No one signs up for a monthly plan.

Behind the scenes, the system runs on Coinbase's x402—a payment standard that lets websites charge software for access—to verify payments. USDC transactions settle on Base, Coinbase's native blockchain network.

Cloudflare is not acting alone. Agentic commerce—the idea of using AI agents to search for products, make purchases, and handle payments for users—has gained momentum over the past year as more companies build tools to support it. Many of those same companies are positioning stablecoins as the natural rails for those payments.

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has been one of the idea's most vocal proponents. In "The Agentic Economy," a roughly 18,000-word essay published in July, Allaire envisioned a future in which AI agents increasingly carry out transactions for people and businesses, using stablecoins as programmable money.

Crypto and payments companies have moved fast. Last month, MoonPay integrated its AI-enabled payment and wallet tool into Grok, X's chatbot. In May, Robinhood said customers could use AI agents to make purchases on their behalf with the Robinhood Gold credit card. Circle, Stripe, and Tempo have also announced tools intended to let AI agents hold funds or make payments.

The credit card networks have joined too. In April 2025, Visa unveiled tools that let AI agents shop and pay for users without giving merchants their actual card numbers. That same month, Mastercard announced a program that lets verified agents make purchases within limits set by users.

The difference in Cloudflare's approach is granularity. Instead of agents transacting on a card network or holding balances in a wallet app, the Monetization Gateway turns every single website visit by an agent into a metered, settled transaction—pay-per-access rather than pay-per-month.

For businesses that rely on traffic from AI agents—search tools, data providers, content platforms—the model offers a direct answer to a growing question: how to monetize automated visitors that never see an ad and never click a paywall. Cloudflare's closed beta will test whether that answer works at scale. If the company hits its early-2027 target for wide availability, per-access stablecoin billing could become standard infrastructure for the machine-to-machine web.