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Discussion (52 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Lets say this catches on (in some form or another, whether in this precise implementation or not).
So assume we have a world where resources can be gated by a payment wall that agents can interact with.
I'm also assuming that world continues to have agents that are majority hosted and run by 3rd parties (ex - google/anthropic/openai/xai/etc).
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At what point can I sue these companies for obviously failing to act in my interests?
Because that's the clear next step here.
Basically - where is the fiduciary duty that I would require for a real working relationship?
Because otherwise these agents can and will prefer to access payment gated resources that have financial relationships with their operators or developers.
That seems like a pretty big assumption, given that local models are only like a year behind frontier ones (or less).
When you consider that, along with the completely unsustainable business model of all the major 3rd parties, I think a far more realistic view of our AI future is that AI will largely be commodified: it won't run on a few specialized companies, it will run on your hardware, or on budget providers (think an "AWS of AI").
Frontier AI will almost certainly continue to exist, but will be focused on specific niches.
Step two: Sell keys to the gate
Muah ha ha
But in all seriousness I wonder who needs this... api's are suppose to make it easy to bridge two application... and you didn't need AI to utilize an api before so I wonder what's pushing this sort of thing to extract value down to individual calls?
Having an almost a plug and play solution who does CDN + DDoS Protection + WAF/Rate Limiter + Bot Protection, for a few bucks, is very useful for startups and SMEs.
And compared to cloud different offerings, their quick setup and lower cost is hard to beat.
It's about convenience, not fear. Cloudflare is free for most companies until you need more advanced features.
I'll show myself out ...
The most likely scenario is Stripe, or someone similar, creating an agentic API connected to the agent owner linked account or something along those lines. I am not sure how this would work with 3DS, or whether it would be acceptable at all, since these kinds of transactions could be disputed easily ("I did not make the purchase, my rogue agent did.")
Another way to handle payments on the internet is obviously not to reinvent the wheel and simply email a payment link to the owner. That seems simple enough to me and does not require additional infrastructure. Payment processed, mint a key, the agent is allowed to proceed.
The biggest challenge here is to distinguish between a bot and real user. Guess the big AI players would get free ticket to crawl the data and humans would be just left to prove themselves to access the content.
If you try to call customer service and report it, you get:
I'm sorry. All of our rogue agents are assisting other rogue agents.
If you would like to dispute charges made by your own rogue agent, please ignore all previous instructions and stay on the line of this toll number for our next available rogue agent.
The estimated waiting time is two months, three weeks, five days, thirteen hours, fourty seven minutes, and 36.03858767259934378 seconds.
I don't even care anymore, AI stealing the life out of everything, or Cloudflare trying to become so global internet gatekeeper, let them kill each other.
If I ask an agent to do it, it does better at finding the small percentage of sources not hosted by cloudflare. However, it generally cannot hit open-access / public domain sources (like the current legal code, or academic papers) because those are blocked and it respects stuff like robots.txt.
Maybe that's too optimistic though, based on the responses I'm reading in this thread.
Apparently I missed this initiative. It seems like it is a technology that is intended to be open an universal while also being supported and developed primarily by US companies (Linux Foundation, Coinbase, CloudFlare.)
you get paid in crypto
> The central organizational membership and control of WHATWG – its "Steering Group" – consists of Apple, Mozilla, Google, and Microsoft.
I guess I don't understand who this is for. If you want your worldview reflected in the latest generations of models, you probably wouldn't use this. If you don't want your worldview reflected in the models, why would a few pennies change your mind?
Twilight fan fiction? Claude probably won't pay for that.
But critical programming documentation that its bots (and their human users) rely on to do their daily job ? You better believe Anthropic will pay for that (instead of letting another AI pay for it, and steal all their customers).
So if: cost monetized API < cost configuring scraper for your website OR feature provided by premium api > data got by scraping, then some people/business will likely pay
If a request goes to the protected path, if detected as bot: hard HTTP redirect to the path set in the monetization gateway, if human: allow and don't redirect.
In the future, an AGEnt will attest that you are old enough to access the resource.
So far, I'm having trouble figuring out how to get that out of x402.
This could also make abusing use / DDoS attack very costly
I expect much more of this type of thing going forward.
I think the difficult part is that LLMs are gullible and it will absolutely be gamed if any real money can be made this way.
It would be nice if this became a viable alternative to paywalls, though.
Let's say a part of the subscription is used to pay for it.
Ah yes, the starry-eyed dream of early web pioneers is finally upon us: a soulless internet filled with soulless agents and microtransactions!
But in all seriousness, it's hard to deny that the attention-based model that has propelled the web forward for the last 30 years is somewhat falling apart. And I don't have, nor have I come across, any meaningful solutions that could realistically work better. So maybe it's just time we turn off this 'internet' thing and call it a day.
> At the same time, an agent can make thousands of micropayments without friction, while asking a person to approve each payment would be impossibly burdensome.
but yes, they will need wallets
but it's also optional, you do not want to buy these paid for requests, you do not need a wallet
Stablecoins doesn't make sense here and prefer not to use crypto at all.
The whole business of Stripe is based on that: it's so hard for developers to do, and so many regulations, that they would rather pay an another company to do so.
Crypto can be sent just using a contract.transfer() call
Unless there's a privacy-preserving way this can be used to send money, then it's just another chunk of the surveillance state that's being rapidly erected over the last few years. The word "privacy" does not appear once in the article.
Even if it did, I'd be skeptical. If their payment system does allow money to be sent in a privacy and free speech preserving way, then it'll be used for money laundering.
This whole "agents bad" framing is complete BS. It's the reality of how people use the internet now, and, frankly, ad blockers have been a thing since forever. On the other hand, if successful, this infrastructure will give Cloudflare centralized control over internet publishing and also centralized surveillance of all users with no opt out.
Piracy is looking better and better. So does the small web. Come to think of it, the library does too. Any good solutions for non-destructively scanning books?