Google’s AI is Buying Stuff?! 🤯

by

Oh, good grief. Google’s gone and cooked up something called AP2. Apparently, it’s supposed to be a fantastically clever way for robots (they call them ‘AI agents’, fancy that!) to fling your money around. They’ve teamed up with a whole gaggle of companies – Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation, even Metamask! It’s a right mess of crypto, stablecoins, and perfectly ordinary, boring old cash all jumbled together in one ‘trusted’ system. Honestly, you’d think they’d have better things to do. 🙄

Google Advances AI Payments With AP2, Teaming With Coinbase and Crypto Firms

So, September 16th, a day that will live in infamy (probably), Google announced this AP2 thing. It’s a ‘standardized framework’, they say, for these AI agents to waltz around making payments. Securely, of course. As if we *want* them making payments! The company bleated:

We’re collaborating with a diverse group of more than 60 organizations to help shape the future of agentic payments, including Adyen, American Express, Ant International, Coinbase, Etsy, Forter, Intuit, JCB, Mastercard, Mysten Labs, Paypal, Revolut, Salesforce, Servicenow, Unionpay International, Worldpay, and more.

Good heavens, the list goes on forever! Sounds like everyone and their aunt is involved. This AP2 thing builds on some other protocols they dreamed up – Agent2Agent and Model Context, whatever *those* are. It gobbles up ordinary payments *and* these digital whatsits – stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. Google insists AI agents “need” to buy things, because apparently, they’ve got more spending money than sense. 🤷‍♀️

The whole shebang hinges on these ‘Mandates’. Cryptographically signed, they say. Sounds awfully important. Apparently, it ‘proves’ you told the robot to go and buy a toaster (or a spaceship, who knows?). Covers both quick purchases and long-term missions for the bots. Google explained its digital asset integration:

AP2 is designed as a universal protocol, providing security and trust for a variety of payments like stablecoins and cryptocurrencies.

“To accelerate support for the web3 ecosystem (whatever *that* is!),” Google says, they’ve slapped on something called the A2A x402 extension. It’s ‘production-ready’ for robot-based crypto payments. Honestly, it sounds like they’re making this up as they go along. 🤪 Extensions will ‘help shape’ the future, they claim. Oh, *sure* they will.

This x402 doodad lets crypto do things within AP2, enabling these programmable, agent-led transactions. Which means your robot might decide to invest in underwater basket weaving, just because it can.

The big cheese at Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, chirped about it on his little ‘X’ platform:

x402 + Google just unlocked a new level for AI agents. Agents can actually pay each other now, with x402 powering the stablecoin rail inside Google’s new Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2). Really cool.

“Really cool?” Is that all you’ve got? By stuffing stablecoins, Ethereum, and wacky tokens into one big framework, Google wants AP2 to be a bridge between the old ways of paying and this newfangled digital stuff. Analysts reckon this might get people using AI for shopping (though why anyone *would* want that is beyond me), and give shops and customers a safe-ish way to pay with both ordinary money and these internet tokens. It’s all terribly exciting… isn’t it? 😒

Read More

2025-09-17 04:58