AWS WAF added a feature called AI traffic monetization. It lets you charge AI bots that hit your site or API for access to your content. Until now, dealing with AI crawlers meant a binary choice, allow or block. This adds a third path: take payment and let them through.

I won't go deep into the feature itself here, how a content owner sets up monetization. The official announcement covers that.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-waf-adds-ai-traffic-monetization-capability-to-help-content-owners-charge-ai-bots-for-content-access/

What I want to look at is the other side. The story of the side defending content is, at the same time, the story of the side reading it, the side running autonomous agents. HTTP status code 402, reserved for years and rarely used, becoming practical means the cost structure of an agent reading the web is starting to change. For the payment protocol itself, I'll read it from the x402 spec.

The "let them read, recoup later" business model that AI broke