Forbes reported it last week: "Visa, Mastercard and Coinbase are fighting over how AI agents pay." The estimated market: $5 trillion by 2031.
Two incompatible answers to one question. When software spends your money, what settles the transaction?
Camp 1: Visa and Mastercard. Tokenized card credentials. The agent gets a virtual card number with transaction boundaries baked in. Partners include Anthropic, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Mistral.
Camp 2: Coinbase. HTTP 402 protocol (x402). USDC stablecoin settlement on Base. 119 million transactions processed. Native to AWS Bedrock AgentCore.
Both camps are fighting over the payment rail. Neither is fighting over the authorization layer that sits above it.
