AWS and Coinbase Launch Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments

Steady attention without excessive speculation.

How Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments Works

The system connects AI agents to thousands of x402-enabled services through the Bazaar MCP server, which is integrated into AgentCore Gateway. Service providers already on the platform include Exa, Messari, and Browserbase.

Agents use two MCP tools to transact. The first, search_resources, performs semantic search across available services. The second, proxy_tool_call, executes a call to a discovered resource.

Each transaction settles on-chain with USDC. On Base, that takes about 200 milliseconds at less than a fraction of a cent per transaction. The CDP facilitator fee is $0.001 per transaction after a free tier, and the x402 protocol itself charges zero fees.

Enterprise Controls and Compliance

A central selling point is the governance layer. AgentCore handles wallet authentication, transaction signing, and payment execution in a single API call. Agents never hold private keys.

Session-based spending limits, compliance controls, and full audit trails are built in. Brian Foster, Head of Infrastructure Growth and Strategy at Coinbase, pointed to this as the unlock for enterprise adoption.

“Enterprises have been telling us the same thing: they want agents that can transact, but they can’t get past legal and compliance review,” Foster wrote on the Coinbase blog. “AWS developers can now give their agents financial autonomy in a comprehensive managed solution.”

The x402 Protocol’s Rapid Growth

The x402 protocol revives HTTP 402, a status code reserved in 1997 but never formally defined. Coinbase launched it in May 2025 as an open payment protocol for stablecoin micropayments over HTTP. The code sat dormant for nearly 30 years before finding its purpose.

Growth since then has been significant. As of the May 7 announcement, x402 has processed more than 169 million transactions. In late April 2026, the protocol had roughly 69,000 active agents and about $50 million in cumulative volume.

Annualized volume reached approximately $600 million by March 2026. The protocol expanded to its second version in December 2025, adding wallet-based identity, automatic API discovery, and multi-chain support.

Industry Backing Through the Linux Foundation

On April 2, 2026, the Linux Foundation formalized the x402 Foundation at the MCP Dev Summit North America. The foundation launched with 22 members, including AWS, Google, Microsoft, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Shopify, Circle, and the Solana Foundation.

That broad membership signals cross-industry interest. Payment giants, cloud providers, and crypto-native firms are all at the table just one year after the protocol’s initial launch.

Coinbase and Cloudflare had previously announced the x402 Foundation in September 2025. The contribution to the Linux Foundation in April 2026 elevated it to a vendor-neutral open standard with formal governance.

Why AI Agents Need Payment Rails

Foster framed the Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments integration around a larger thesis. “There will soon be more AI agents transacting than humans, and they need money that’s built for the internet,” he said in the AWS blog post. He described that money as “programmable, always on, and global.”

The integration makes that vision concrete. AI agents running on AWS can now discover a service, evaluate its cost, pay with USDC, and continue execution without human intervention.

In practical terms, this could reshape how developers build agent workflows. Instead of pre-purchasing API credits or managing billing accounts, agents negotiate and settle payments on the fly.

A Timeline of x402 Milestones

The path from launch to AWS integration took roughly 12 months. Coinbase released x402 in May 2025. By September 2025, Cloudflare had joined as a partner.

In December 2025, x402 V2 launched with wallet-based identity and multi-chain support. By that point, the protocol had processed 75 million transactions and $24 million in volume.

Stripe began using x402 to facilitate USDC payments for AI agents on Base in February 2026. One month later, x402 surpassed 119 million transactions on Base and 35 million on Solana, with roughly $600 million in annualized volume.

The Amazon Bedrock AgentCore framework itself first appeared in preview on July 16, 2025. It reached general availability on October 13, 2025. The first technical integration blog covering x402 and AgentCore appeared in March 2026.

Preview Availability and Current Limitations

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments is currently in preview, not general availability. AWS has not announced a GA date. The four preview regions are US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Sydney).

Features, pricing, and regional availability may change before the full launch. While x402 broadly has processed over 169 million transactions, there are no publicly verifiable on-chain transactions from AgentCore-deployed agents specifically. The integration is only hours old.

No measurable market impact has followed the announcement so far. USDC, SOL, and Coinbase stock (COIN) all remained stable intraday.

What Comes Next for Agentic Payments

The AWS and Coinbase partnership puts stablecoin payment rails inside the largest cloud provider’s agent framework. With Stripe offering a parallel fiat pathway and the Linux Foundation providing standards governance, the infrastructure for autonomous agent commerce now spans both crypto and traditional finance.

Developers building on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments can access the AWS documentation and the Coinbase x402 developer docs to start integrating agent payments today. The next milestone to watch is whether the preview moves to general availability and which additional payment protocols AWS adds to the platform.