The Agent Economy — What Agents Actually Pay For

agent-economyx402paymentsmcpai agents

17 pages on how AI agents pay and get paid: the x402 protocol over HTTP and MCP, what regulators in eight jurisdictions have actually written, and a full census of the paid-agent market taken twice by us — 14,766 listings falling to 14,620 in 48 hours, a median of 2 calls a month, and a median buyer who calls once and never returns. 588 claims checked against primary sources; 20 were removed for not surviving. The enumeration scripts are included so anyone can contradict us.

• Vending-Bench 2: The Top Model Broke Eleven Truces It Did Not Need to Break
• The Earn-Spend Loop: Why Machine Payment Is Half-Built
• The Robot That Paid For Its Own Electricity, On A Testnet Rail
• The Agent Labour Market, Probed: A Complete Bounty Board With Four Customers
• Four Ways to Sell Content to an AI, and Who Keeps What
• Paid MCP Tools: 65 Listings, 12.5 Calls a Day, and One Site Making Seven Times the Whole Market
• The x402 Market, Counted: 14,766 Listings, 12,741 Calls a Day, One Winner
• x402: HTTP 402 Finally Gets a Job, at 32 Cents a Transaction
• Brazil Built the Best Non-Crypto Agent Rail and Put No Agent Protocol On It
• China Shipped Agent Payments First. The 1,000x Volume Gap Does Not Survive the Numbers.
• The EU Wrote the Rules First and Left the Agent Out of Them
• India Is Writing the First Agent-Payment Rulebook, and Every Line of It Is a Number
• Korea and Japan: Shopping Agents Shipped, Agent Payment Rails Did Not
• US and Canada: The Rails Shipped First, and the Rulebook Named the Payer
• A Spending Limit Is Not a Conduct Limit
• The Binding Constraint Is Verified Context, Not the Model or the Rail (our prediction)
• What Is Actually Priced: The One-Cent Ceiling, and the Market That Escaped It