AI agents will need to pay for compute, data, and API calls as they become more autonomous. Today's AI agents rely on humans to manage API keys and billing — but what happens when agents need to make purchases independently, across services they've never used before? The bottleneck isn't intelligence. It's payments. Current AI agents can reason about complex problems but can't autonomously pay a new API provider without human intervention. This creates a dependency that breaks down as agents become more sophisticated and need to operate independently. Why Agent Payments Matter We're moving toward an economy where AI agents will be major participants. These agents will need to purchase compute resources, access specialized datasets, call premium APIs, and even pay other agents for services. But today's payment infrastructure assumes humans are making purchasing decisions. Traditional API billing models use monthly subscriptions or pre-funded accounts managed by humans.…