Amazon Web Services has added budget and time controls to payments by AI agents, while a study of Base settlements found totals alone offer little evidence that services were delivered.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) made Bedrock AgentCore payments generally available Aug. 18. Coinbase and Stripe Privy wallets can connect to AgentCore, which supports x402 and the Machine Payment Protocol (MPP). Developers can set a budget and expiration time for each payment session. AWS says AgentCore checks proposed payments against the budget before signing them.
The x402 protocol lets a website or API request payment as part of a web transaction. It does not set an agent’s spending authority or confirm delivery of an off-chain service.
The paper How Agentic Is Agentic Commerce? A Population-Scale Measurement of x402 Adoption and Authenticity, submitted to arXiv July 14, 2026, by Shengchen Ling, Yajin Zhou, Lei Wu and Cong Wang, counted 136,708,672 settlements worth $44,121,383.81 on Base over 280 days, from Sept. 17, 2025, through June 23, 2026.
The researchers classified 21.20% of settlements as fictitious and 63.78% as transfers among wallet groups their analysis linked. Those classifications do not prove the internal transfers were fictitious or that operators lacked off-chain businesses or intended to mislead.
The researchers found that $187,861.35 reached an advertised catalog service, a demonstrated floor for independent service revenue. Services outside the catalog were invisible to that count and could raise the floor. Separately, the paper set $20,258,746.09 as an upper bound on genuinely independent activity, including settlement value the researchers could not prove was manufactured.
The paper says facilitator-sponsored gas makes settlements inexpensive to produce. It estimates that settlements linked to operators accounted for $240,943 of the $355,583 in gas costs paid by facilitators. Settlement records show transfers and wallet relationships, but cannot by themselves establish whether an off-chain service was delivered.
