Visa, Mastercard, Stripe Back Open Standard Enabling AI Payments

The HTTP 402 'Payment Required' status code, reserved by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991 for future use, has finally found its purpose. On July 14, 2026, the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation, a new open-governance body that utilizes this dormant code as the settlement layer of the agentic internet.

The launch brought together 40 founding organizations from every major layer of the payments ecosystem, including Visa, Mastercard, and American Express on card-network side, Stripe, Adyen, and Fiserv on processor side, Google and AWS on cloud infrastructure, Circle and Coinbase on stablecoins, and Solana Foundation, Stellar Development Foundation, and Ripple on blockchain rails.

x402 was built to address the structural gap in the current payment architecture, which assumes a human at the point of authentication. AI agents cannot fill out credit card forms, create accounts, or wait for invoice approvals, making it impossible for them to function as full economic participants without human involvement.