Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments is now generally available: “enabling agents to transact safely and autonomously at scale”

Agents have evolved from simple chat applications to autonomous, long-running systems that dynamically discover and compose dozens of tools per task without human oversight. On the other side, service and content providers are moving from human-centric subscription-based, one-size-fits-all pricing to pay-per-use, per-execution models where costs are often a few cents. Today, agents are doing a great job at reasoning, choosing tools, and completing tasks, but they hit a roadblock when payment is involved.

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To address this, we launched AgentCore payments in collaboration with Coinbase and Stripe in preview in May, enabling agent developers to equip their agents to autonomously pay for paid APIs, MCPs, and content with a few lines of code. Today, we are happy to announce that this service is generally available, enabling enterprises to power agentic payments with security, guardrails, and observability for production workloads.

Key features

Wallet support

Agents need a source of funds to make agentic transactions. AgentCore payments addresses this by integrating with Coinbase and Stripe Privy wallets, enabling developers to set up payment capabilities by providing Coinbase or Privy API keys and secrets. These are stablecoin wallets purpose-built for cost-effective microtransaction payments, often in cents. End users can fund their agent’s wallet through traditional payment methods like credit cards or through USDC stablecoin and must grant delegation to the agent to spend on their behalf. To verify security, AgentCore stores developer credentials in the AgentCore Identity Secrets Manager. The agent does not see the raw credentials. AgentCore payments uses short-lived tokens derived from these credentials to instruct the wallet provider to perform wallet operations (such as transaction signing) as directed by the developer’s agent, adding an extra layer of security for the interactions.

For GA, we built a “Quick Create” option for Coinbase directly within AgentCore Payments (available through the console or CLI) that enables developers to provision credentials without leaving AgentCore, saving developers time and effort. For Stripe Privy, developers need to obtain the credentials from the Privy dashboard and provide those to AgentCore payments.

Payment orchestration

AgentCore payments is built to be protocol-agnostic, abstracting away the complexity so developers can integrate once and work with merchants regardless of which protocol they use. At preview, we launched with support for the x402 protocol. At GA, we have expanded protocol support to include the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), another standard for machine payments co-authored by Stripe and Tempo, enabling developers to pay for any MPP-compatible service without an additional line of code. Additionally, we have introduced support for the “upto” scheme within x402, which enables an agent to set a spending ceiling rather than committing to a fixed price. This unlocks true pay-per-inference and dynamic pricing: a merchant serving LLM tokens, compute, or any usage-metered API can now charge for exactly what was consumed at the end of a call, rather than requiring a fixed price for requests (as with the “exact” scheme supported today).

Discoverability of pay per use endpoints

AgentCore exposes pay-per-use x402 endpoints offered by Coinbase as an MCP server via AgentCore Gateway, enabling agent developers to discover and select relevant paid endpoints based on their use case. We have now enhanced this discovery experience by updating the MCP server to a curated list of high-quality endpoints based on social proof, metadata richness, description quality, and availability.

Payment limits

Agents are inherently non-deterministic, so they can misinterpret a response as authorization to spend or repeat a payment because of an unexpected retry. In AgentCore payments, transactions run within a payment session, a scoped payment context for a single agent interaction. A payment session has two configurable caps: a maximum spend amount in a specified currency, and an expiry time. Before signing a payment, AgentCore payments checks the request against the session budget and rejects requests that would push the session past its cap. The check is deterministic and runs at the infrastructure layer.

Observability

As agents execute autonomous transactions, developers need comprehensive observability—including payment audit trails, detailed logs, and key metrics such as success rates and average transaction values—to maintain visibility and audit their agents’ spending behavior. AgentCore payments integrates with AgentCore Observability to give developers visibility into the payment lifecycle and automatically emits vended logs to your Amazon CloudWatch log group, and vended spans to AgentCore Observability. AgentCore Observability includes prebuilt dashboards that show end-to-end transaction health (for example, transaction success rate, average transaction value) across agents, payment sessions, and time periods.

Use cases

Pay for paid web content

Publishers hosting content on the web today are blocking agent access and monetizing agent traffic. Enterprises deploying AI agents that access the web in real time, whether for information retrieval or web-based automation, AI browser tool providers, and agentic web search providers would benefit from integrating with the AgentCore payments service, which enables their agentic solutions to pay for paywalled web content without breaking the agent workflow. To enable this, we continue to collaborate with Content Delivery Networks (CDN) including Amazon CloudFront and Cloudflare. One of our customers, Anchor Browser, integrated with AgentCore payments to unlock paywalled web content for their customers.

“Anchor Browser is one of the leading cloud-based browser automation platforms for enterprises with millions of traffic per day, purpose-built for AI agents. We are excited to integrate AgentCore payments to enable our customers to unlock paid web content within their web-based agentic workflows. The integration was smooth, and it offers a secure way to handle agentic transactions with built-in payment limits.” said Idan Raman, CEO, Co-Founder of Anchor Browser.

“Publishers spent years building paywalls. Now AI agents need to get through them. Amazon CloudFront and AWS WAF give content owners a single control plane for AI traffic — which agents can access what content, at what price, and for what use — with payment verified at the edge over the open x402 protocol. Agents built on AgentCore can pay to access this content without breaking their workflow. Content owners enable agent traffic on their terms — that changes the conversation from defense to commerce.” said Nishit Sawhney, General Manager, AWS Edge Services.

“Cloudflare sits in front of a significant share of the world’s content, APIs, and MCP servers. Our Monetization Gateway lets owners of those assets charge agents directly, per request and at a price they set using the open x402 protocol. With AgentCore payments, enterprises building agents on AgentCore can access and pay for these assets on day one.” – said Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer, Cloudflare.

Pay per inference

Pay-per-inference is an emerging use case for agentic transactions, enabling agent developers to dynamically switch between models to optimize for cost without compromising on quality and the overhead of managing API keys and subscriptions with individual model providers. One of our customers, SpreadX, used AgentCore Payments in their new AI product, Incarna, to pay for inference through BlockRun — a routing and payment layer where agents pay per call over the x402 protocol.

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with AgentCore payments, which offers a managed service that makes it easy for agents to securely access and pay for BlockRun’s pay-per-use endpoints, unlocking a whole new pay-per-inference use case.” said Vicky Fu, Founder and CEO, BlockRun.

Consumer and deep research use case

Travala, a travel provider, has integrated AgentCore payments into their Travala Travel MCP servers, enabling end customers using agentic platforms like Claude to safely and securely book hotels conversationally in a single chat. Similarly, Elsa AI and Heurist AI use AgentCore payments to deliver financial research and advisory to their end customers by accessing pay-per-use APIs over the x402 protocol.

“Integrating AgentCore payments into the Travala Travel MCP streamlines the agentic booking process for our 2.2 million properties globally. This integration offers a secure way to handle agentic transactions with built-in payment limits, improving the overall agentic booking experience for our customers.” said Juan Otero, CEO of Travala.

Follow the link to see how you get started with AgentCore payments