MoonPay says it has made a big advance in the nascent field of using AI agents for consumer purchases. On Thursday, the payments company unveiled PayBox, a new wallet tool that users can plug into their Claude or ChatGPT screens, and that is capable of carrying out a wide variety of transactions that range from booking flights and restaurant reservations to shopping on Amazon. The tool will be live on July 28.
According to Neeraj Prasad, the Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs, the new PayBox tool supplies a critical final tool when it comes to shopping with popular AI agents. Non-technical consumers, he says, have so far been able to instruct their agents to explore purchase options and fetch prices, but not pull the trigger and actually buy something.
In its announcement, MoonPay described PayBox as “closing that last step for everyone” and noted that the tool doesn’t require users to write code or install a special program. Instead, in the case of Claude, users simply search for PayBox in the Connectors menu of the agent’s settings tab. Once the user adds PayBox, they can provide the wallet with funds from a bank account or with cryptocurrency.
The upshot is that a user’s Claude or ChatGPT agent is effectively carrying a purse of money. This means the user can tell the agent in plain English to go out and make a purchase at any merchant, provided the merchant has added the capacity to interact with agents. In the case of booking a table, PayBox users can pay Resy to hold reservations and, for flights, users can tell their agent to use an agent-friendly service called Brij.
