AI Agents Are About To Spend Your Money. Visa or Stablecoins?

Vídeo em Inglês, publicado pelo canal Dana Love, PhD.

About this content: The summary, key points and topics below are generated automatically from the video transcript. They reflect the content, opinions, claims and predictions presented in the video and do not represent a position, validation or fact-check by IA Dots.

Video summary

The video examines how AI agents are beginning to conduct financial transactions and the emerging competition between traditional card networks like Visa and Mastercard and stablecoin rails like the X42 standard. It analyzes the technical and trust mechanisms each side is building, such as agentic tokens, audit trails, and refund protocols, and explores why consumer payments and machine-to-machine payments may use different underlying rails.

Key points

• AI agents are increasingly being used to perform tasks such as booking rides, making phone calls to negotiate bills, and handling purchases.
• Traditional card networks like Visa and Mastercard are developing secure agentic tokens, directory services, and fraud probability scores to facilitate and monitor AI payments.
• Stablecoin standards, notably X42 built on protocols like USDC, are being adopted for machine-to-machine transactions such as API access and data fetching.
• Traditional payment rails offer consumer protection features like chargebacks and liability limits for unauthorized charges or undelivered goods, whereas on-chain stablecoin transactions are generally irreversible.
• Major tech and financial organizations, including Google, Amazon, and various card networks, are navigating liability and trust issues as automated agents attempt to interact with merchant checkout systems.

Topics

AI agentsAgentic commerceStablecoinsPayment railsCredit card networksX42 protocolConsumer protection

Video transcript

Transcript from available captions; it may contain errors.

Within a few years, software you have never met will spend your money. AI agents are already booking rides and calling banks. Visa, Mastercard, Google, and Coinbase are each building the rails those agents will run on, and they do not agree on what kind of money moves across them. One side is the card networks, the other side is stable coins, and their standard for agent payments is named after an error code. won the internet reserved in January 1997 for payment required and then never used about $28,000 a day. That's what CoinDesk reported in March for X42, the standard Coinbase built on. And according to the analytics firm Artemis, roughly half of that activity was artificial wallets paying themselves. Now the other side, Visa says it is running stable coin settlement at about $7 billion a year and it signed a strategic collaboration with Open AAI for agent payments. Mastercard launched new trust services for its agent pay program on September 30th. Google published its agent payments protocol with more than 60 organizations behind it, including PayPal, American Express, Mastercard, and Coinbase itself. And Visa says it has linked to more than 160 stable coin linked card programs live or in development. So who is winning this crypto AI fight? Here's the strange part. Visa and Mastercard both signed up to support X42, the crypto standard. Hold on to that. Before I show you why, I tested one of these assistants myself. A disclosure first. The next two minutes are paid sponsorship and the sponsor had no say in anything else in this video. A reporter at the Boston Globe asked a personal assistant to find him cheaper home insurance yet ran the searches and made the calls. He is now paying about $1,000 a year less. Now imagine a million people doing that together. Every cable bill, every insurance premium, every subscription that raised its price, all challenged at once. These companies have always counted on you not calling. What happens when everyone has something that calls for them? A partner at Menllo Ventures says he uses it at least three times a week on X. People keep posting their results. It is called Pine and Pine is the sponsor of this segment. So I tested it. I had Pine call my bank and ask why transfers to Coinbase get held. When the bank asked something unexpected, it checked with me and kept going. Crypto exchanges get extra fraud screening. Once I confirmed the transfer, they cleared it. Then I handed my overdue motorcycle property tax to Pine. It knew most of what to ask, asked the rest as it went, and took it to the payment screen. Then it handed me the card field. For now, that is where I wanted to stop. Everybody has a bill that they're overpaying at a call they keep putting off. Most AI tells you what to say. Pine picks up the phone, talks to the company in a natural sounding voice, and does the work. Next up for me, my internet bill, car insurance, and refunds. The link is in the description and the pinned comment. Today, those assistants make the calls and fill in the forms. The last step, the payment, is the one the whole industry is racing to hand them. And who carries that money is the fight this video is about. I'm Dana Love. Three things I'll prove today. One, AI agents already pay with cards today in real markets, and the card networks are building the guard rails to keep it that way. Two, the stable coin rail for agents is real technology backed by serious names with almost no real commerce on it yet. Three, these two rails are not fighting over the same payment. One is built for machines paying machines. The other is built for you and the diff and for me and the difference is whether you can take the money back. And by the end, you'll know why both card companies signed up for the crypto standard anyway and my odds on who carries your agents money through 2028 and exactly what would prove me wrong. Hold me to all three. Let's get forensic. On April 7th at Suanaboomi airport in Bangkok, an AI agent booked a ride into the city and paid for it. Mastercard says it was the first live agentic transaction in Thailand and it has completed them in eight other Asia-Pacific markets from Australia to Hong Kong. Not a demo, a ride. Jack Foresttold is Visa's chief product and strategy officer. In June, he put it this way. AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stable coins are reshaping the back end. Hold that sentence. It matters later. Visa's agent program is called Visa Intelligent Commerce. Look at what it does on Visa's own demo. When a shopper adds a card for her agent, the real card number gets replaced with what Visa calls a secure 16digit Agentic token. Same card, new layer. Visa also launched an agentic directory that verifies which agents and which merchants are legitimate. In plain terms, Visa wants to know who the robot is before it lets the robot pay. The demo keeps going. Visa locks every price before purchase. Their words, what she sees is what she pays. And at checkout, Visa generates a one-time security code for that single transaction so the code can't be reused. Visa even built a tool called agent score that grades merchant websites on whether they're ready for agents to shop them. Well, of course they would. If agents are the new customers, merchants need a report card. Mastercard is building the same thing from the other direction. Anne Johnson is executive vice president of security solutions at Mastercard. On September 30th, she said AI agents will make commerce more intuitive and efficient, but only if people in businesses can trust the systems acting on their behalf. Mastercard's release projects that one in 10 consumers will routinely use AI agents for shopping and payments by 2030. The first new service, a probability score, is being tested in the US. And the banks are asking for the same thing. Todd Kennedy is executive vice president of payment strategy at Capital 1. His line, greater visibility into how transactions are initiated, authorized, and executed will be critical. Initiated, authorized, executed. This is a bank telling you it wants a receipt for every decision the robot makes. Now, the obvious objection. Cards are slow and expensive, so surely an agent wants something faster and cheaper. for a ride across Bangkok. Though, the fee is already priced in, the merchant already takes the card, and the [snorts] customer already trusts it. Nobody has to install anything. That's point one. If this kind of forensic look at crypto and payments is useful or fun to you, now is a great time to subscribe. Computers talk to each other all the time. We call this the internet. As computers talk to each other, they can tell each other like, "Hey, show data in this way." or hey here's an image or here's a piece of audio but they have no way of saying here's money. >> That's Eric Reppel. He is head of engineering at Coinbase developer platform and he created X42. Remember the error code here it is http status 402 payment required that sat in the web's rule book from January of 1997. Developer documentation still lists it as reserved for future use. No browser supports it. For almost 30 years, the internet kept a slot for payments and left it empty. The X42 protocol fills the slot. A stable coin is a token built to hold $1 of value. USDC, issued by Circle, is the one this standard leans on. Coinbase's white paper calls it an open payment standard that enables AI agents and web services to autonomously pay for API access, data, and digital services. The money is primarily USDC and the white paper sends a or says a payment settles in about 200 milliseconds on base. Notice what's on that list. API access data digital services, not groceries. And the backing is serious. In April, the Linux Foundation launched an X42 Foundation. The companies expressing support include Amazon Web Services, American Express, Circle, Cloudflare, Google, Stripe, Mastercard, and Visa. Visa and Mastercard signed on as supporters, not as the people running it. Google went further when it launched its agent payments protocol. It built a crypto extension for X42 with Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation, and MetaMask, and called it production ready. Then there's the traffic. So, is Agentic Commerce overhyped? Coindesk ran the numbers in March using data from Artemis. About 131,000 X42 transactions a day, an average payment of 20 cents. And roughly half of it fell into two buckets Artemis called artificial. Self-dealing, where the same wallet is both buyer and seller, and wash trading, where the seller funds the buyer and the buyer sends it right back. Huh? Now, the number inside the number. Coindesk also looked at the roughly $7 billion market value people site for the X42 ecosystem. About $6.3 billion of that is Chainlink's link token, which predates X42 and does plenty of other things. Take it out and the ecosystem is a fraction, a small fraction of the headline. So on the numbers today, yes, it is overhyped. But here is the strongest case for the other side and it deserves full attention and full strength. Coindesk Coindesk's own conclusion was that the merchants this standard built for barely exist yet. The pipes come before the economy. That's fair. Pipes usually do come first. So I take that seriously. But look at who those future merchants are. They are APIs selling data to software 20 cents at a time. That is a real market. It is just not the one where your AI agent pays your property tax. Your credit card comes with a promise most people never read. Under federal rules, if you get charged for something that wasn't delivered to the consumer or the consumer's design is agreed, that's a billing error and your card issuer has to investigate it. the consumer's design, somebody you sent to do the buying for you. That language was written long before anyone had an AI agent. And my read is it fits one like a glove. Now, put that next to USDC. Circle, the company that issues it, says in its own risk disclosure that an onchain transaction is irreversible, and Circle does not have the ability to reverse or recall any transaction once initiated. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, cash works the same way. So, these two rails are not racing for the same payment. One is built for a machine buying data 20 cents at a time. The other is built for us when the thing we paid for never shows up. There's a trap on the bank side, too. Under the rules for debit and bank transfers, a payment only counts as unauthorized if someone made it without your permission. The rule specifically excludes a person you handed your access to. Give an agent your logon and my read is that everything it does with that may count as you. That's why the card's not delivered as agreed promise matters so much. And that's the difference between a credit card and a debit card. It covers what your design bought, not just who bought it. Google saw the liability problem coming. Its agent payments protocol builds in what it calls mandates. When you approve a cart, you sign a secure, unchangeable record of the exact items and price. Google calls the whole chain a non-reputable audit trail. I love that phrase. In plain terms, a receipt nobody can argue with. And yet, watch them. And the stable coin side knows it has a gap. Circle built something called the refund protocol, an escrow, an arbiter, and a waiting period before the merchant gets paid. Circle's own words, "Stable coin payments have become closer to cash than modern digital payments." Smart people, they're building chargebacks. Now, the merchants, and this is where it stops being theory, Meta launched a shopping assistant called Muse. Amazon barred it, saying it violates Amazon's terms by posing as a human shopper. Insurify, the insurance com comparison site, blocked it, too, worried about incomplete insurance information and multiple credit checks that could hurt a customer's credit score. At least that's what they said the reason was. Not everyone said no. Wayfair is working with Meta and a restaurant on Toast's platform took Muse's order for fries and pizza. I don't know why anyone orders fries with pizza, but probably pineapple pizza. So, the door is open in some places and shut in others. And the reason it shuts is the same every time. Nobody knows who answers for the robot. Which brings me back to my motorcycle text. Remember where my assistant stopped? Right at the card field. Visa's own demo makes the same choice. >> She tells her agent to use the [music] new card. Her agent asks for final confirmation and Sarah verifies with Visa. One last biometric check. >> Her agent asks for final confirmation and Sarah verifies with Visa. One last biometric check. Hayawatha Bray writes the Techlab column at Boston Globe and is the one the reporter uh is is the reporter who saved that thousand dollars. Their verdict on agents valuable as long as they're kept on a tight leash. The leash is the payment. Everyone building these systems keeps a human holding it. And that's why Visa and Mastercard signed up for the crypto standard. Remember Jack Foresttol's line, AI on the front end, stable coins on the back end. Sounds like a mullet. My read, they aren't betting against stable coins. They're betting stable coins end up underneath them. My take is always my opinion. I look at possible future cases and give them odds. They are projections. Please treat them as such. 70%. through 2028. Card and bank rails carry most US consumer payments made by AI agents with stable coins settling maybe underneath 80%. On the machine side, X42 carries more than $1 million a day in real commerce by March 31st, 2027. AI is real and it's only growing. Those two numbers don't contradict each other. That's kind of the point. Software will pay software and nobody disputes a 20 cent data call. You will want your money back the first time an agent books the wrong flight. What breaks my 70%. The big one is the CFPB extending dispute rights to stable coin payments which takes away the card network's best advantage. I put that at 35% by June 1st, 2027. That might be generous. My read is their rulew writing runs slower than the SEC's or the CFTC's. My read is also there's a technology gap. Paul Atkins is the chairman of the SEC and in October 2025 he told a hedge fund conference his main concern as SEC chair is to futureproof this against future potential changes. My read is that rules adopted fast become very hard to undo. That's pretty much what he said and that carries well beyond the SEC. If the CFPB moves, it sticks. Congress doing it instead 5%. Second falsifier. A top five US retailer reports stable coins carrying more than 10% of its AI agent checkouts. If that happens, I'm I'm wrong. One non-m mover, a top five retailer accepting USDC, 25% by the end of this year, 95% by the end of 2027, and it doesn't move by 70% because accepting it isn't using it. When any of these moves, I'll bring it here. You'll get to see it. Right or wrong, the machines will pay each other in stable coins. You'll pay with whatever lets you take it back. Have you been following what South Africa is doing to Bitcoin? South Africa's draft crypto rule book lets your Bitcoin leave for your own wallet and names no way back in. It makes no sense and that begs for a video to look at it. I haven't followed up enough about the story in South Africa and I suspect it may still be a blueprint for other countries. I'm Dana Love. I appreciate you watching. Thanks for inviting me on to your screen. I'll see you in the next

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Assuntos: Agentes de IA, Assistente pessoal, Muse. Publicado no YouTube em 2026-10-12.

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