Stripe's push to shape the future of AI money

Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison.

Big names in crypto, payments and cloud infrastructure are racing to build the financial plumbing for a world in which AI agents — not humans — handle transactions on the internet.

Stripe, Coinbase Global and Cloudflare are forming a nonprofit foundation to govern x402, an open-source protocol that lets software make instant payments without human involvement — one of at least two competing standards vying to become the default rails for machine-to-machine commerce.