Cloudflare opens a closed beta for billing AI agents in USDC

Cloudflare said Wednesday that it will let businesses charge AI agents in USDC, Circle's dollar-pegged stablecoin, using tools the cloud security firm has not yet released to the broader public; the announcement, reported by Fortune, is the second stage of a wider Cloudflare push to build a payment system for software that shops and reads on someone else's behalf.

The initiative, called the Monetization Gateway, rests on a narrow premise: an agent automatically pays a small fee each time it reaches an online service, rather than a person signing up for a monthly subscription or typing in a card number. It is in closed beta for eligible U.S.-based buyers and sellers, and it builds on cloudflare.pay, an August rollout that lets agents prove they are acting for a user and spend from a linked wallet.

"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, a product manager at Cloudflare, told Fortune in an email.

Cloudflare sits between a website and the agents that visit it, and when an agent asks for information or a service, Cloudflare presents a price and releases access once the agent's payment clears, with no card details and no monthly plan. Verification runs through x402, the Coinbase payment standard that lets websites charge software for access, and the USDC settles on Base, Coinbase's own blockchain network, putting one transaction across three companies: Cloudflare's gate, Coinbase's standard and settlement chain, and Circle's token.

Fortune describes Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire as one of the most vocal proponents of agentic commerce, and in "The Agentic Economy," an essay of roughly 18,000 words published in July, he envisioned AI agents carrying out more transactions for people and businesses, with stablecoins as the programmable money underneath.

The queue of companies building agent payments has formed quickly: MoonPay has integrated its AI-enabled payment and wallet tool into Grok, X's chatbot, and 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 announced tools intended to let agents hold funds or make payments, while card networks are working the same territory from the other side of the transaction; in April 2025 Visa unveiled tools that let agents shop and pay for users without handing merchants the actual card number, and Mastercard announced a program for verified agents that same month.

Cloudflare's use of x402 is the detail with reach beyond its own product, since the company could have written its own protocol for agent payments but the Fortune account does not say why it adopted Coinbase's instead. The consequence is that an agent seeking access to a participating site needs a wallet that speaks x402 and pays in USDC on Base, and that is harder to unwind later because standards are cheapest to change before anyone builds against them.

The card networks, arriving from the other direction, asked for something different: agents that identify themselves and settle on rails already in place, competing defaults for how software pays for things, and the one wired into the tools developers already use is likely the one that holds.

Identity is the requirement both camps share: cloudflare.pay exists so an agent can demonstrate it is spending on a user's behalf, and Mastercard's program is described as one for verified agents. The difference lies in what the proof unlocks—an established card rail, or a wallet funded with USDC paying per request—and Cloudflare's bet, in effect, is that the party verifying the agent and pricing the request sits close enough to the money to influence which rail carries it.

What the announcement does not carry is flow: there are no transaction counts, no settled value and no indication of how Cloudflare gets paid, and the beta reaches only eligible U.S. buyers and sellers. That shape has become familiar, as stablecoin and agent-payment rails get introduced by describing their coverage before anyone describes their volume; this publication made the point about Mastercard's Stellar rail in September, when it went live across BVNK's footprint in 130 markets and the disclosure carried no settled value that would prove the strategy.

The tools also stop short of the portion of stablecoin payments that is hardest to assemble: the payout layer is a licensing business, built from licences, audits and local scheme connections. Cloudflare's product is not that; it presents a price and gates access, and the coverage does not describe it holding balances or moving money between countries.

For the businesses on the selling side, the shift from subscription to per-call pricing would change operations if it sticks: a site that charged a monthly fee for data or a service would instead meter each request from software and collect automatically, converting a predictable revenue line into a volume-driven one and pushing reconciliation and treasury decisions onto the seller. Whether sellers end up holding USDC balances, who would custody them, who sets the price an agent is shown, or whether the fee is denominated in USDC rather than merely calculated in it, the announcement does not say.

Lohe's timetable puts broad availability in early 2027, leaving the next year for the closed beta to gather users under its eligibility rules; when Cloudflare next describes the product, the figure that would settle the adoption question is settled transaction volume on Base tied to x402 requests, and that number did not appear this week.