The state of agent payments.
Every protocol, rulebook and rail that intermediates agent-initiated payments, in one place — what shipped versus what was only announced, what is legally binding versus voluntary, and which widely-repeated claims do not survive their primary sources. Every entry carries its own links. Confidence is marked, not smoothed over.
The stack
Four contested layers over one uncontested substrate. Discovery does not get its own band — UCP treats discovery through post-purchase as a single protocol, which is the industry's own answer to where that boundary sits. Click any protocol to jump to its entry.
Protocol catalog
Every protocol, rulebook and rail in scope. Status separates what ships from what was announced; confidence records how well the claim survived fact-checking. Expand any card for mechanics, known gaps and named adopters.
What you would actually deploy
Six stacks that compose in practice. Note what Stack A — by far the highest real volume — does not contain. And note that Stack F should not be deployed at all.
What moved
Verified changes in reverse order, and the status transitions behind them. Every entry here survived a three-lens adversarial check against a primary source — discovery alone never reaches this list. Corrections to widely-repeated claims now sit inside the protocol they correct; open any catalog card to see them.
Movement history appears once the pipeline has run.
Who governs what
Standards-body cover is thinner than the press releases suggest. No binding rule requiring agent identity in payments exists in the US, UK, EU, Singapore or India.
| Body | Owns | State | Since | Reality check |
|---|
By jurisdiction
Ordered by how far each regulator has actually gone. The gap between rhetoric and rule is wide everywhere — and the only binding text governing agent payments anywhere in the world is a card scheme's private rulebook.
| Jurisdiction | Posture | What exists | Binding? |
|---|
Regulatory clock
The binding constraints over the next 24 months are not new AI rules — they are old rules with 2026 and 2027 dates. Three comment windows are open right now — two US, one Indian — and all three are places to put a position on the record before the frameworks harden.
How it happened
Six years from LSAT — the first HTTP-402 revival, five years before x402 — to a landscape with five competing checkout and settlement standards, one binding rulebook, and an unresolved federal appeal over whether agents may act inside a logged-in session at all. Most of it happened in the last fourteen months.
Watchlist
Protocols the monitors keep seeing that are not in the catalog above, with how often they have come up. Being mentioned is not being real — nothing here has been verified, and appearing on this list is a reason to look, not a claim that it matters.
Nothing on the watchlist.