AI Agents Will Move Money. The Infrastructure Isn't Ready. In Q1 2026, Stripe launched the Machine Payments Protocol. Mastercard shipped Agent Pay with agentic tokens. Visa announced Intelligent Commerce. Cloudflare deployed Web Bot Auth for agent-initiated transactions. AWS published guidance on x402 for autonomous payments. FedNow crossed $245 billion in quarterly volume with 49,000% year-over-year growth. The message is clear: AI agents are entering the payment system. Not as assistants that help humans pay, but as autonomous actors that initiate, authorise, and execute financial transactions without a human in the loop. But every one of these platforms assumes someone else handles trust. Stripe authenticates the API key. Mastercard validates the token. Visa checks the credential. None of them answer the question that matters: should this specific agent, making this specific payment, to this specific counterparty, at this specific amount, right now, be trusted to do so?…