AWS announces Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments (preview), enabling AI agents to instantly access and pay for APIs, web content, MCP servers, and other agents.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments is a new set of features built in partnership with Coinbase and Stripe, providing wallet infrastructure and payment rails for AI agents to transact autonomously. The service handles the full lifecycle from wallet authentication through transaction execution to spending governance and observability.

At preview, the service supports the x402 protocol, an open HTTP-native payment standard for instant stablecoin micropayments. When an agent requests a paid resource and receives an HTTP 402 'Payment Required' response, AgentCore authenticates with the configured wallet, executes the stablecoin payment, and delivers content back to the agent within the execution loop. Developers set per-session spending limits that the agent cannot exceed.

Developers from companies like Cox Automotive, Thomson Reuters, and PGA TOUR already use AgentCore to build agents; with today's announcement, those agents can now transact using the same identity system, agent gateway, and observability they already rely on. The Coinbase x402 Bazaar MCP server is being made available through AgentCore gateway to help agents discover and pay for services on their own.