Agentic Commerce Weekly

Working Dev's Hero

One story a week about AI agents that shop, pay, and get paid, explained properly in about ten minutes. We follow the payment rails, the court rulings, and the merchants deciding whether to let the bots in. New episode every Monday from Working Dev's Hero.

  1. Sep 15

    13. Mastercard Admits 22 Startups to Its First Agentic Commerce Cohort

    Mastercard seeded 22 startups across the whole agentic commerce stack in the same week a market tracker found zero additional merchants had declared support for agent payments. That's not a bet that merchants have adopted it — it's a bet the infrastructure to make them adoptable doesn't exist yet. We cover the six layers the cohort covers, why a reconciliation company and an AI liability insurer in a payments accelerator is the real tell, and the detail that says most: standard corporate insurance was carved back around AI in January, which is why somebody now sells it back. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/02b19060-f512-448d-8cee-d458c3ac907d

    13. Mastercard Admits 22 Startups to Its First Agentic Commerce Cohort

  2. Sep 8

    14. Mastercard Launches Agent Connect a Week After Anthropic's Open-Source Blueprint

    Anthropic shipped an open-source commerce agent blueprint that deliberately excludes a payment protocol, a catalog and an ad layer — the shopping brain without the wallet. Seven days later Mastercard launched Agent Connect to be exactly that wallet. Meanwhile Visa's own CEO told investors 75% of consumers distrust agents spending their money. We cover what the blueprint includes and what it pointedly leaves out, how Verifiable Intent answers the trust problem technically, and why the two halves of this story run on completely different clocks. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/8f789553-7a3f-4601-a107-d6fd4ecd9da4

    14. Mastercard Launches Agent Connect a Week After Anthropic's Open-Source Blueprint

  3. Sep 1

    12. Rain Launches the Agentic Payments Alliance With Visa, Mastercard and 24 Others

    Twenty-six companies joined the same coalition, including Visa and Mastercard, who spend the rest of the year shipping competing agent products against each other. There is no specification, no charter, and no product — at launch this alliance is a room, and the news is who agreed to sit in it. We cover which layer it actually sits on, why sorting the membership reveals the strategy, and the fraud problem nobody has solved: 48% of banks allow AI transactions by default while 31% block them, with no shared vocabulary for what a legitimate agent looks like. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/247f322d-9df0-4c49-b43a-190fdb069898

    12. Rain Launches the Agentic Payments Alliance With Visa, Mastercard and 24 Others

  4. Aug 24

    11. Ninth Circuit Vacates Amazon's Injunction Against Perplexity's Shopping Agent

    America's main anti-hacking law turned 40 and got its first federal appellate test against an AI shopping agent. The injunction did not survive: the court held the user accesses Amazon, not Perplexity, because the agent takes pictures of the customer's own screen and never opens a connection to Amazon's servers. We cover why architecture is now a legal fact rather than a latency decision, the two doors into every storefront, and the liability gap the ruling widened — consumer dispute rights survive delegation to an agent, but the merchant's evidence trail doesn't exist yet. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/3030972b-4c85-4cf5-8a7e-e7544bb31e50

    11. Ninth Circuit Vacates Amazon's Injunction Against Perplexity's Shopping Agent

  5. Aug 17

    10. The IAB Publishes the First Standard for Measuring Brand Visibility in AI Answers

    Only 16% of brands systematically track whether they appear inside AI answers — against Google AI summaries reaching 2.5 billion people a month. More than 20 vendors sell AI visibility tools and none of their numbers reconcile. The IAB's framework is the first attempt at a common standard. We cover the four-layer hierarchy, the distinction between being mentioned and being cited as a source, and the finding that should change how you buy these tools: most of them are directional at best, while directional data is being used to move media budgets. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/f5d5141e-dc0e-4411-8bf6-a65d11dd4699 **Sources** - IAB — Measuring Visibility in the AI Era - McKinsey CMO survey data on AI-mediated discovery - Chartbeat / Axios — publisher search referral decline - LQ — research on brand citation divergence between search and AI overviews

    10. The IAB Publishes the First Standard for Measuring Brand Visibility in AI Answers

  6. Aug 10

    9. MoonPay Launches PayBox, a Non-Custodial Payment Vault for AI Agents

    Alipay processed 120 million AI-assisted payments in a single week in February — real production volume, no human confirming at checkout. The West's missing piece was never discovery; it was letting an agent pay without handing over control of the money. PayBox splits the key across secure enclaves so the agent can prepare a transaction but structurally cannot execute one alone. We cover the custody paradox, the two operating modes and what they say about liability, and why the Western architecture looks nothing like Alipay's. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/50561797-de38-4e0f-9f0b-b540f728833b **Sources** - MoonPay — PayBox newsroom post - PR Newswire — MoonPay launches PayBox - CoinDesk — MoonPay acquires Sodot in $100M stock deal - NielsenIQ — The Commerce Revolution: Where East Meets West

    9. MoonPay Launches PayBox, a Non-Custodial Payment Vault for AI Agents

  7. Aug 3

    8. Linux Foundation Launches x402 Foundation With Visa, Mastercard and Stripe

    The HTTP status code for "payment required" sat unused since 1999 because card fees made tiny payments impossible. AI agents changed that: an agent can't open a bank account, but it can sign a transaction. The Linux Foundation made the x402 Foundation operational with 40 members — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Google, AWS, Shopify, Coinbase, Circle, Ripple and Cloudflare among them — and agents ran 75 million payments through the protocol in 30 days. We cover why the code sat unused for 27 years, why direct competitors all backed the same standard, and the tension nobody says out loud: an open standard whose volume runs overwhelmingly on one stablecoin, on one company's chain. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/c863b275-497f-426a-a9d5-a84f20f283f1 **Sources** - Linux Foundation, "Operational Launch of x402 Foundation": https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-operational-launch-of-x402-foundation-to-standardize-internet-native-payments-for-ai-agents-and-applications - CoinDesk, "Visa, Mastercard and Ripple Join the Standard Letting AI Agents Pay in Stablecoins": https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2026/07/15/visa-mastercard-and-ripple-join-the-standard-letting-ai-agents-pay-in-stablecoins - Fortune, "Agentic commerce is coming — and the battle to build its infrastructure is on": https://fortune.com/2026/07/20/agentic-commerce-stablecoins-infrastructure-circle-ceo-jeremy-allaire/ - UCPChecker, "State of Agentic Commerce: July 2026": https://ucpchecker.com/blog/state-of-agentic-commerce-july-2026 - Coinspeaker, "x402 Protocol Fuels 1.4M AI Agent Transactions on Ripple XRPL": https://www.coinspeaker.com/x402-protocol-xrpl-ai-agent-transactions-ripple/

    8. Linux Foundation Launches x402 Foundation With Visa, Mastercard and Stripe

  8. Jul 27

    7. Akamai Finds Commerce Is Now the Top Target for AI-Driven Cybercrime

    47.9% of global e-commerce traffic came from AI bots, and commerce has passed financial services as the most targeted industry for AI-driven cybercrime. The weapon is the same technology enabling legitimate agentic shopping. We cover the three techniques doing the damage, why 90% of retailers are watching rather than governing, the phishing volume that doubled in eight weeks, and the line that stuck with us: loyalty points are the new shadow currency — stolen without triggering a single payment fraud signal. **Read the full report:** https://api.automate.it.com/feed/working-devs-hero/agentic-commerce/f14c350e-e98d-4b06-972c-a81d396ee7bb **Sources** - Akamai — Commerce Becomes the Epicenter for AI Bot Attacks and Agentic Fraud in 2026 - Akamai Blog — Smash and Grab at Scale - Intelligent CISO — APAC's AI-powered commerce boom fuels surge in bot and API attacks - CSO Online — Prompt injection breaks today's AI agents - Bessemer — Securing AI Agents

    7. Akamai Finds Commerce Is Now the Top Target for AI-Driven Cybercrime
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One story a week about AI agents that shop, pay, and get paid, explained properly in about ten minutes. We follow the payment rails, the court rulings, and the merchants deciding whether to let the bots in. New episode every Monday from Working Dev's Hero.

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