AWS launches AgentCore payments for AI agents

How agents pay for themselves

An AI agent often has to make small purchases to finish a task: a model inference, an API response, access to web content, or a call to another agent. Each of these can cost a fraction of a cent, and they happen inside the agent's loop with no person available to approve them.

Amazon aims to solve this with AgentCore payments, a managed capability inside Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. It lets agents pay for services per request and enforces spending limits at the infrastructure layer instead of relying on the model.

x402 protocol and wallet management

The system works with endpoints that respond with HTTP 402 ("Payment Required"). The agent signs the transaction with a configured wallet and returns cryptographic proof to the merchant. Incarna provisions each agent's wallet through the Coinbase CDP connector; the customer owns the wallet and grants Incarna delegated authorization to use it.

Payments settle in a stablecoin. In Incarna's case that is USDC on the Base network, and each transaction is verifiable on-chain. Because spending limits are enforced outside the model, an agent cannot exceed them even if its prompt is manipulated.

The Incarna and BlockRun example

BlockRun is a pay-as-you-go inference router serving more than 90 models from more than 15 providers over x402. The Incarna team says it cut the work of adding x402 payment support from months to days and put an end-to-end pay-per-inference flow into production.

AgentCore payments works with x402-compatible endpoints, including Amazon Bedrock inference endpoints. Teams can set it up through the AgentCore payments skill in the Agent Toolkit for AWS (in Claude Code, Kiro, or Codex) or manually with the AgentCore CLI, AgentCore SDK, or AWS SDK. Credentials are stored in AWS Secrets Manager.