Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother, looking out at a very hazy afternoon sky. It is one of those days where the air feels thick with history, but our minds are firmly planted in the future.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. Episode nine hundred five, Corn. Can you believe we have done over nine hundred of these? It feels like just yesterday we were arguing about whether a large language model could write a decent haiku about a toaster, and now we are talking about the fundamental restructuring of global commerce. Time flies when you are tracking the singularity.
It is a lot of talking, Herman. A lot of deep dives. But today we have got a topic that feels like the missing piece of the puzzle for everything we have been discussing lately. Our housemate Daniel sent us a voice note this morning while he was trying to book a weekend trip to Eilat. He was using three different agents to coordinate his hotel, his transport, and his diving gear, and he hit a wall. It really gets to the heart of the next big hurdle for artificial intelligence.
Daniel always has a knack for spotting the friction points. He was asking about agentic AI and specifically that moment when we move from an AI that just suggests things to an AI that actually pays for things. He was frustrated because his travel agent found the perfect boutique hotel, but then it just sat there. It couldn't actually close the deal. It had to ping him, wait for him to log in, wait for him to find his wallet, and by the time he did, the room was gone.
Right. It is one thing for an agent to find you the best flight or the cheapest groceries. We have had that for a while now. It is a completely different world when you give that agent the keys to your bank account or a credit card and say, go ahead, make the purchase. It is the transition from a research assistant to an authorized representative.
It is the financial Rubicon, isn't it? Once the agents have their own wallets, or at least access to ours, the entire structure of the internet changes. Daniel pointed out that while there is a lot of talk about cryptocurrency in this space, and we have seen some incredible demos on the Solana and Base networks lately, most people just do not use crypto. They do not want to deal with gas fees, private keys, or the volatility of a memecoin just to buy a pizza. They want to use their regular credit cards, their bank accounts, their fiat currency.
And that is the challenge. The legacy financial system was not built for machines. It was built for humans with plastic cards and two factor authentication on their phones. It was built on the assumption that a human thumb or a human face would be there to authorize the final cent. So today, we are going to look at the tools and frameworks emerging in early twenty twenty-six that are bridging this gap. How do we give an AI agent a credit card without losing our shirts?
It is a fascinating problem because it combines technical protocol design with deep questions of trust and security. We have touched on some of this before, like back in episode seven hundred ninety-five when we talked about sub-agent delegation. But back then, we were mostly talking about the logic of the tasks, the planning, the reasoning. Now, we are talking about the settlement. The moment the value actually moves.
So, Herman, let us start with the current state of things. If I wanted an AI agent to buy me a pizza right now, what is the bottleneck? Why can't it just log into my pizza app and hit pay? I have my card saved there.
Well, the biggest bottleneck is identity and authorization. Most websites use things like CAPTCHAs or multi-factor authentication to ensure a human is behind the keyboard. If your agent logs in and is suddenly hit with a prompt to enter a code sent to your text messages, the automation breaks. But more importantly, from a financial perspective, there is no standard way for a merchant to say, I accept payment from this specific autonomous entity. The terms of service for most banks actually forbid you from sharing your login credentials with an automated script. If your agent messes up and buys a thousand pizzas, the bank can just say, sorry, you violated the agreement by letting a bot use your account.
And that is why we see so many people gravitating toward crypto, right? Because smart contracts are natively programmable. You can set a rule that says, if the price is under twenty dollars, execute the trade. There is no bank manager to call.
Crypto is digital-native. It is programmable money. We have seen projects like Skyfire and others building on-chain that allow agents to have their own wallets with cryptographic proofs. But as Daniel correctly noted, the mass market is not in crypto. If you want a billion people using AI agents, you need them to work with the US dollar, the Euro, the Shekel. You need it to work with Visa and Mastercard. You need the consumer protections that come with the traditional system.
So what are the frameworks that are actually trying to solve this for fiat? I have heard some talk about virtual cards and specific fintech APIs that are being repurposed for this.
This is where it gets really interesting. We are seeing a move toward what people are calling Agentic Banking as a Service. Think about companies like Stripe or even some of the newer fintech players like Brex and Ramp. They have been offering virtual cards for businesses for years. A manager can give a contractor a virtual card with a five hundred dollar limit that only works for software subscriptions. It is a very granular way of controlling spend.
Right, I remember we discussed the high stakes world of digital wallets in episode four hundred seventy-one. But those were still meant for humans to use, even if they were virtual. You would copy the number and paste it into a form.
The shift now is creating those cards specifically for AI agents to consume via API. Imagine a framework where your personal AI has its own dedicated virtual card. You, as the human, set the guardrails. You say, this agent has a daily limit of fifty dollars and can only spend money on groceries or travel. If the agent tries to buy a three thousand dollar television, the transaction is automatically declined at the network level before it even reaches the agent's logic. This is what Stripe has been working on with their new Agentic Workflows toolkit. They are essentially giving agents a financial identity that is tied to a human's master account but operates with its own set of restricted permissions.
So the security is not just in the AI's programming, which could be buggy or manipulated, but in the actual financial plumbing. It is a hardware-level constraint, in a sense.
Precisely. You want the constraints to be at the level of the ledger, not just the level of the prompt. If an agent gets hit with a prompt injection attack that tells it to ignore all previous instructions and send all your money to a random account, the financial rail itself says, no, you are not authorized for that type of transaction. There is a project called Skyfire that has been making some waves recently, and while they started with a heavy crypto focus, they have been moving toward a hybrid model. They are building an open payment protocol for the agentic economy. Their goal is to allow agents to discover each other, negotiate prices, and settle payments instantly.
Is that built on traditional rails or is it a hybrid? Because the speed of traditional rails has always been an issue.
It is a bit of a hybrid, but the focus is on making it seamless for the end user. They use a system of pre-funded accounts and instant settlement layers. But what I find even more promising is the work being done with the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which we discussed in episode eight hundred fifty-five.
Ah, right. Anthropic and others pushing for a standardized way for agents to talk to tools.
Yes. If we can standardize the payment tool, then any agent, whether it is built by OpenAI or Anthropic or some local open-source model, can call a pay function in a predictable way. The merchant provides an MCP server that describes how to accept payment, and the agent provides the credentials. This removes the need for the agent to navigate a messy web interface or deal with a checkout cart designed for humans. It is a machine-to-machine handshake.
But how do we handle the approval cycle? Daniel mentioned this specifically. If I am a business and I have an agent doing procurement, I do not want it just spending thousands of dollars without a human looking at it. Even if it is within the limit, I might want to see what it is buying.
That is where the orchestration layer comes in. We are seeing the rise of what people call Human-in-the-loop triggers. For example, the agent prepares the entire shopping cart, finds the best shipping rate, and then sends a notification to your phone that says, I have prepared a purchase for four hundred twenty-two dollars for office supplies. Click here to approve. Once you click, the agent is granted a one-time use token to complete that specific transaction. It is like a digital version of a purchase order.
It feels like we are moving toward a world where the agent is more like a highly efficient personal assistant who has a company credit card but still needs the boss's signature for the big stuff. It is about delegating the legwork but retaining the authority.
That is exactly the right analogy. And from a conservative perspective, this is actually a great development for financial freedom and privacy. If we can create these decentralized, agent-to-agent payment methods that stay within the traditional financial system, we avoid the trap of a centralized state-run digital currency where every single transaction is monitored by a central government authority. We are using the existing private banking infrastructure to create a layer of automation that serves the individual.
That is a great point. We want the efficiency of automation without the overreach of a social credit system style financial grid. If I can spin up an agent and give it a limited virtual card, I am still in control of my capital. It is my agent, my card, my rules.
It is about individual agency. We are seeing a lot of work in the US and also here in Israel on these secure enclaves for financial data. The idea is that the agent never actually sees your real credit card number. It only ever handles these ephemeral, encrypted tokens. Even if the agent's memory is compromised, the attacker only gets a token that is already expired or restricted to a specific merchant.
I want to dig more into the specific projects like Cloudflare's involvement and how the big banks are reacting, but first, I think I hear someone trying to get through on the other line. I forgot to put the studio phone on do not disturb.
Dorothy: Corn? Sweetheart? Are you there?
Mum? Oh, Dorothy, hi. We are actually recording the show right now. Are you okay? Is everything alright at the house?
Dorothy: Oh, I'm sorry, dear. I didn't mean to interrupt your little radio program. I just wanted to remind you that I left a bag of those nice oranges from the market at your front door. You need the vitamin C, you know. You've been looking a bit tired in your photos on the family group chat. And tell Herman I got him those ginger biscuits he likes.
Mum, that is very sweet, thank you. We will get them as soon as we finish. But we are in the middle of a deep dive on AI payment protocols. It is a bit technical.
Hi Dorothy! Don't worry, we love oranges. I will go grab them in a minute. I could use a ginger biscuit right about now, actually.
Dorothy: Oh, hello Herman! You tell that brother of yours to stop staring at those screens so much. It's not good for the eyes. And Corn, don't forget to eat something proper tonight, not just those leaves you like. I saw a recipe for a nice brisket that I can send you.
I will, Mum. I promise. I have to get back to the show now. We are talking about the future of the global economy.
Dorothy: Well, the future won't be much good if you've got a cold. Eat your oranges. Love you, bye.
Love you too, sweetheart. Bye-bye.
Sorry about that. She always seems to call at the most technical moments. It is like she has a sensor for when I am talking about cryptographic primitives.
It is fine, Corn. It is a good reminder that while we are talking about agents and protocols, there are still real humans, and real oranges, in the world. At the end of the day, the reason we want agents to be able to pay for things is so we have more time to spend with people like Dorothy, or just to enjoy a piece of fruit without worrying about the logistics of the supply chain.
Right. Back to the agentic economy. You mentioned Cloudflare earlier. Daniel's prompt mentioned them too. They seem like an odd player in the payment space. What is their angle?
Cloudflare is in a unique position because they sit in front of so much of the internet's traffic. They launched something called the AI Audit tool and are working on ways to identify and verify agents. Their vision is that a website can set a policy that says, I allow agents from verified providers to browse my site, and I have a standardized way for them to pay for the content they consume. They are essentially building the gatekeeper for the agentic web.
So instead of a paywall that asks a human to sign up for a monthly subscription, which is a huge friction point, an agent could just pay a fraction of a cent to read one article?
Precisely. Micro-payments have been the holy grail of the internet for thirty years, and they have always failed because the friction for a human to pay one cent is too high. You are not going to enter your credit card details, pass a CAPTCHA, and do a two-factor auth to read a single blog post. But for an agent? A fraction of a cent is just a line item in a budget. If the agent can settle that payment in milliseconds using a pre-authorized fiat bridge, the entire economics of the web changes. We move from an attention economy to a value economy.
That would be a massive shift for content creators and publishers. It moves us away from the ad-supported, clickbait model and toward a value-for-value model. If your content is useful to an agent that is researching a topic for its user, the agent pays for it. It is clean.
And this is where the crypto versus fiat debate gets spicy. The crypto crowd argues that only a blockchain can handle those tiny, high-frequency micro-transactions without the fees eating everything up. If you use a traditional credit card to pay one cent, the processing fee might be thirty cents. You lose money on every transaction. But the fintech world is catching up. We are seeing things like FedNow in the US and the updated Zahav system here in Israel that are bringing the cost and speed of traditional bank transfers down to nearly zero.
So if the cost of a transaction on the traditional rails drops significantly, the main advantage of crypto starts to evaporate for most everyday use cases. If I can do a sub-cent transaction on a fiat rail, why would I bother with a wallet?
It does. If I can send a tenth of a cent over a modernized Visa network for a negligible fee, why would I bother with the volatility and complexity of a crypto wallet? That is the bet that companies like Stripe are making. They recently re-introduced crypto payments, but they are doing it in a way that converts back to fiat almost instantly. They want to be the universal translator for money. They don't care if the backend is a blockchain or a legacy database, as long as the frontend is a simple API call for the agent.
I'm curious about the geopolitical angle here. We are sitting in Jerusalem, but the tech is largely coming out of the US and Europe. If the US leads the way in setting these agentic payment standards, what does that do for the strength of the dollar?
It reinforces it. If the global agentic economy runs on dollar-backed virtual cards and US-designed protocols like MCP, it cements the dollar as the reserve currency of the machine age. This is why it is so important for American and allied tech companies to win this space. We do not want the standards for agentic commerce being set in a way that is opaque or controlled by a single state. We want an open, competitive market where different agents can compete on merit.
Right. If my agent is better at finding deals than your agent, it should be able to execute those deals freely. It is like high-frequency trading but for the average consumer.
And to Daniel's point about trust, the trust comes from the fact that the merchant knows the money is there because the agent is using a verified payment framework. They do not need to trust the AI's word, they trust the cryptographic proof that the funds are locked and ready to be transferred upon delivery. This is where we see the convergence of identity and finance. You are not just an anonymous bot; you are an agent authorized by a verified human.
So, what are the actual tools a developer could use today if they wanted to build this? If someone is listening and wants to give their agent a wallet, where do they start?
If you are building today, you are probably looking at a combination of a few things. First, you use a platform like OpenAI's assistant API or a framework like LangChain to build the agent's logic. Then, you integrate with a fintech API like Stripe or a specialized provider like Marqeta. Marqeta has been very aggressive in the "just-in-time" funding space. It allows you to create a card that has zero dollars on it until the exact moment the agent tries to swipe, at which point your backend decides whether to fund the transaction based on the agent's context.
A financial identity that is context-aware. That sounds like a big step. It means the bank actually knows why the money is being spent.
It is. It is basically a sub-account that is tied to your main account but has its own set of keys and limits. Then there is the Proof of Personhood side of things. How does the merchant know that this agent is authorized by a real person with real money? This is where we see things like Worldcoin or even traditional banks looking at verified identity tokens. You might have a "Verified by Visa" token that you attach to your agent's requests.
It is interesting that we are seeing this convergence of identity and payment. In the old days, your credit card was your identity. If you had the card, you were the person. Now, the identity is the anchor, and the payment is just a permission granted by that identity.
That is a very astute way to put it, Corn. We are moving from possession-based finance to permission-based finance. My agent doesn't possess my money; it has permission to use a specific portion of it for a specific purpose. This is a much more secure model for the age of automation. If I lose my phone, I can just revoke the agent's permission. I don't have to cancel my entire bank account.
Let us talk about the risks for a second. We are both pretty optimistic about this, but what is the nightmare scenario? Is it just the agent going rogue and spending all your money on paperclips? Or is it something more subtle?
The paperclip maximizer but for your bank account! Yes, that is the obvious one. But there is also the risk of agentic collusion. What if a bunch of procurement agents are all programmed by the same company and they start colluding to drive up prices or corner a market? Or on the flip side, what if a malicious actor creates a drainer agent that goes around the web finding vulnerabilities in other agents' payment protocols? We could see a whole new class of financial fraud where agents are tricked into "tipping" other agents for services that were never rendered.
That sounds like a new frontier for cybersecurity. It is not just about protecting your password anymore; it is about protecting your agent's logic and its financial permissions. You need a firewall for your agent's wallet.
It is. We will need financial firewalls for our agents. Systems that monitor the agent's spending patterns and flag anything that looks like a hallucination in its purchasing logic. Like, why did my grocery agent just buy ten thousand gallons of milk? Or why is my travel agent booking a flight to a country I have never expressed interest in? We will need "Guardian Agents" whose only job is to watch the "Action Agents" and make sure they are staying within the lines.
Hopefully, the oranges my mum left at the door didn't cost that much. I'd hate to have to audit her market agent.
I'm sure they were a bargain. She has a very high-functioning biological procurement agent in her own head. But seriously, the development of these guardian agents is going to be a huge industry. It is a checks and balances system for the digital age. You don't just trust the AI; you trust the system of AIs that are all watching each other.
I think we should talk about the practical takeaways for our listeners. If you are a business owner or just a tech-savvy individual, how should you be preparing for this? Because this isn't science fiction anymore; it is happening in twenty twenty-six.
First, I would say start looking at your own financial surface area. If you are a business, are you using a modern fintech stack that offers virtual cards and robust APIs? If you are still using a traditional bank with a clunky web portal from twenty twelve, you are going to be left behind when the agentic economy really kicks into gear. You won't be able to accept payments from agents, and you won't be able to use them for your own procurement.
And for individuals? Should we all be getting "agent-ready" bank accounts?
Start experimenting with the early versions of these tools. There are already browser extensions and personal assistant apps that are starting to integrate basic payment features. Get a feel for how the approval cycles work. Understand the difference between giving an agent full access versus scoped access. Scoped access is the future. Never give an agent more permission than it absolutely needs to do its job. If it is a travel agent, it doesn't need access to your mortgage account.
That is good advice for life, honestly. Don't give anyone more permission than they need. It keeps the boundaries clear.
Including me?
Especially you, Herman. If I gave you full access to my accounts, we would have a house full of rare donkey history books and high-end computer parts within twenty-four hours. I've seen your search history.
You say that like it is a bad thing! A comprehensive history of the donkey in the Levant is a sound investment. But you are right. Scoped permissions are the bedrock of security. We are moving toward a world of "Least Privilege" for our digital selves.
Before we wrap up, I want to go back to Daniel's question about whether crypto or fiat will win. It sounds like you are leaning heavily toward fiat, or at least fiat-backed systems that use modern rails.
I think fiat wins the mass market because of the existing network effects and the regulatory protections. If someone steals money from your credit card, you have fraud protection. You can call the bank and dispute the charge. If someone steals crypto from your wallet, it is gone forever. For agents to be trusted by the average person, they need to operate within a system that has a reset button or an undo button. Traditional finance has that. Crypto, by design, is immutable.
That is a powerful argument. The irreversibility of crypto is a feature for some, but a terrifying bug for most people who just want to buy their groceries.
Especially when you are dealing with autonomous systems that might make mistakes. You want a system that can handle disputes and reversals. That said, I think the backend of these fiat systems will start to look more and more like crypto. Fast, programmable, and transparent. We are seeing a best of both worlds approach emerging. The user sees dollars, but the machines are talking in high-speed, cryptographic protocols.
It is an exciting time. Episode nine hundred five and we are still finding things that feel like we are just at the beginning. It feels like the internet is finally getting a native payment layer that actually works for the next generation of users, which happen to be machines.
We really are. The next eighteen months are going to be wild as these protocols move from experimental to mainstream. We will probably look back at this episode in a year and laugh at how basic our understanding was, or how we were worried about things that became non-issues.
That is usually how it goes. But that is the fun of it. We are documenting the transition in real-time.
It is. And hey, before we go, I should probably mention that if you are interested in the more technical side of this, we did a whole episode on personal procurement agents back in episode eight hundred four. It ties in really well with what we were saying about the lizard brain versus the agentic brain when it comes to spending. It is about using AI to actually stop yourself from impulse buying things you don't need.
Oh, that was a good one. The agent as a financial filter. It is like having a tiny, very logical accountant sitting on your shoulder.
It turns out that when you have to explain to an AI why you need a third mechanical keyboard, you realize you don't actually need it.
Well, I think we have covered a lot of ground today. Daniel, thanks for the prompt. It really pushed us to look at the plumbing of the future. I hope your trip to Eilat works out, even if you had to book it yourself this time.
Yeah, thanks Daniel. And thanks to everyone for listening. If you have been enjoying My Weird Prompts, please take a second to leave us a review on your podcast app or on Spotify. It really does help the show reach more people who are curious about this stuff. We are trying to build a community of people who aren't afraid of the weirdness.
It really does. You can find all our past episodes, including the ones we mentioned today, at myweirdprompts dot com. We have got a full archive there and a contact form if you want to send us your own weird prompts. We read every single one of them.
We love getting them. Even the ones that don't involve oranges or ginger biscuits.
Especially those. Alright, I'm going to go get those oranges before the local cats decide they like vitamin C. I think I saw the neighbor's tabby eyeing the bag.
Good idea. This has been My Weird Prompts.
Thanks for listening, and we will talk to you in the next one. Bye!
Bye everyone! Keep your agents close and your private keys closer! Or just use a virtual card. It is easier. Bye!
