Who allowed the spend?

When a person pays, the question of authority is settled at the point of payment. They tapped the card, typed the code, approved the push notification. When an agent pays, that moment is gone. Someone gave the agent authority earlier, in some form, and the payment arrives later. Every serious effort to let agents pay is, underneath, an attempt to carry that earlier permission forward to the later moment, and to prove afterwards that it was respected.

Four groups are working on it: protocol authors, card networks, crypto payment developers and regulators of stablecoins. Each covers part of the problem.

Mandates: writing the permission down

Google's Agent Payments Protocol, announced on 16 September 2025 with more than 60 organisations including Adyen, American Express, Coinbase, Mastercard, PayPal and Worldpay, is the clearest statement of the idea. AP2 uses mandates: cryptographically signed records of what the user instructed. An Intent Mandate captures the request and the rules the agent must follow. A Cart Mandate records the exact items and price. When the user is present, they approve the cart directly. When they are not, they sign a detailed Intent Mandate in advance, with price limits, timing and other conditions, and the agent may only produce a Cart Mandate once those conditions are met.

Google describes the chain from intent to cart to payment as a non-repudiable audit trail. AP2 is payment-agnostic: it is meant to work with cards, real-time bank transfers and stablecoins.

Machine-to-machine payment on the web

Coinbase took a narrower route. In May 2025 it introduced x402, which uses the long-unused HTTP 402 "Payment Required" status code so that a server can ask for payment, and a client can pay in stablecoins, inside an ordinary web request, without accounts or API keys. On 23 September 2025 Cloudflare announced it would form an x402 Foundation with Coinbase to keep the standard open. Google and partners also published an x402 extension to AP2's agent-to-agent protocol, so the two can be combined.

x402 settles a payment cleanly. It does not, on its own, say who allowed it or within what bounds. That has to come from the wallet holding the funds or from a layer above it.

Card networks: scoped tokens and known agents

The card networks are extending what they already run. Mastercard said in a 10 September 2025 release that all US Mastercard cardholders would be enabled for its Agent Pay programme by the 2025 holiday season, with a global rollout to follow. It added an Agent Sign-Up process for identifying agents, and said it was working with the FIDO Alliance on a verifiable credential standard that confirms payment details such as amount, merchant and product.

Visa launched Visa Intelligent Commerce in 2025, introduced a Trusted Agent Protocol with more than ten partners in October 2025 to help merchants tell legitimate agents from malicious bots, and said on 18 December 2025 that partners had completed hundreds of controlled, real-world agent-initiated transactions. It expected pilots in Asia Pacific and Europe in early 2026, and is working with Aldar so customers in the UAE can use agents to pay recurring charges.

These programmes answer whether a known agent is presenting a valid, scoped credential. They inherit the networks' existing dispute and chargeback machinery, which is a real strength.

Stablecoin rules: who may issue the money

Where an agent pays in stablecoins, the issuer's regime matters. The rules are now in place or close to it across the main regions, though the dates differ.

In the EU, MiCA's titles on asset-referenced and e-money tokens have applied since 30 June 2024, and the rest of the regulation since 30 December 2024. The transitional period for crypto-asset service providers ended across the EU on 1 July 2026; since then, serving EU clients without a MiCA licence is a breach of EU law.

In the US, the GENIUS Act was signed into law on 18 July 2025. It takes effect on the earlier of 18 months after enactment or 120 days after the regulators issue final implementing rules. The OCC published its main proposal on 25 February 2026. Regulators missed the one-year rulemaking deadline of 18 July 2026, which does not move the effective date, now 18 January 2027 in practice. In August 2026 the Comptroller said the OCC would have a final rule out by November.

In the UK, the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Cryptoassets) Regulations 2026 were passed by Parliament on 4 February 2026. The FCA published its final rules on 30 June 2026, with stablecoin issuance in PS26/10. The authorisation window runs from 30 September 2026 to 28 February 2027, and the regime takes full effect on 25 October 2027.

In Hong Kong, the Stablecoins Ordinance has been in force since mid-2025, and the HKMA granted its first two issuer licences on 10 April 2026, to HSBC and to Anchorpoint Financial, a joint venture of Standard Chartered (Hong Kong), HKT and Animoca Brands.

These regimes govern reserves, redemption and who may issue. None of them decides whether a particular agent should have made a particular payment.

The control that matters: a limit and a record

Put the pieces together and a gap appears. Protocols define how to express permission. Networks verify that a credential is valid. Regulators make sure the money is sound. The question a finance director, an auditor or a court will ask after the fact is plainer: who allowed this spend, under what limit, and can you show it?

Two things answer it. The first is a limit the owner set before the agent acted: which counterparties, which amounts, how often, from which account, with which approvals above a threshold. The second is a record, kept by someone other than the agent, of every payment the agent made and the rule it was made under. AP2's mandates are a good way to express the first. Network tokens and wallet policies are good places to enforce it. But the limit has to belong to the owner, and the record has to survive across every rail the agent uses, because one agent may pay a supplier by card, top up an API by x402 and receive a stablecoin payout in the same afternoon.

Without both, each rail's controls stay local. The card network sees its token, the wallet sees its transfer, and no one sees the agent.

What this means for policy, executive and technical readers

For policymakers, the strongest lever is not a new payment rail but a requirement that delegated payments carry evidence of the delegation. Existing consumer-protection and strong-authentication rules assume a person at the moment of payment; mandates and owner-set limits are a workable substitute, and supervisors can ask to see them.

For executives, treat agent spending like any other delegated authority. Write the limit down before the agent runs, name who can change it, and insist on a single record you can hand to an auditor.

For CTOs, enforce limits outside the agent's own code, keep the record append-only and outside the agent's reach, and normalise payments from every rail into that one record.

Where Praecise fits

Ipnops runs agents across payments, accounting, commerce and mail. It acts with permission, never ownership: every run stays within limits the owner sets and leaves a record. Skerry provides payment rails for agents, including stablecoin settlement: one programmable surface over virtual accounts, stablecoin conversion and cross-border payouts. Bridge and Stripe perform the regulated acts under their own licences. On Praecise Cloud, each agent gets compute, an inbox and a way to pay.