Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)

I feel like the word "protocol", is just abused like it is a glorified marketing term. Kind of like how the word "hacker" was abused in everything else that had nothing to do with hacking.

MCP was just a glorified way of tool calling but generated so much hype (and it eventually died down). Now we have MPP. Which again - could have just been another tool call exposed to the agent.

Imagine you hire someone who claimed to have invented a new protocol and you're thinking of something like TCP or UDP, but all they share is just a markdown file.

Jokes about wallet-draining aside, we're already giving our agents a real cash budget that they use for tokens. Our harnesses have mechanisms to manage that spend. And having an easily detectable protocol would allow the harness to ensure that its deterministic code is in play to make these payments - you'd give your payment details to the harness, not to the agent itself.

And as to use cases, if I want quality outputs for automated research and discovery of a topic, in a world where quality journalism/scholarship should be compensated and does use tools like Cloudflare to block automated access, and where AI-generated content is everywhere, it's optimal for me to want to spend some amount of the money I spend on tokens, on the ability for my agent to access reputable primary and secondary sources as needed.

The challenge, of course, is that now there's an incentive for a spam source to try to get my agent to pay it, rather than the actual creator of the content. But there are interesting ways to solve this, because with these payment rails there's now an incentive for alliances of content creators to maintain indices of reputable sources and their canonical domains - perhaps even authoritative hashes of content. Lots of possibilities here.

"they need the ability to transact with businesses and one another."

Really, they _need_ it. How can we possibly live without computers spending money without supervision?

All payments are final. Cancellations and refunds will be charged a 5% processing fee.

It feels like an attempt to bypass PCI-DSS...

I fail to see how "API call" is anything inherent to Agents/LLMs?

Is this an attempt to get multiple payment processors to adopt the same Payments API so that agents fail less often?

What does this actually have to do with agents? What does the protocol include that makes this useful with AI rather than just a boring old program?

I guess competition with the Bitcoin equivalent https://www.l402.org/

Didn't stripe already have a payments protocol?

Fascinating — this is the future of decentralized finance. Agents will be the entities that both earn and consume.

"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and our bank account!"

Note the absence of invoices, bills of lading, and receipts, all the things you need when a vendor doesn't deliver. All it does is send money, one-way. So it's useless in a B2B context.

the real question for me is what happens when agents start hitting premium data APIs with MPP. right now if i want my agent to pull realtime financial data it has to go through my API keys with monthly billing. with MPP the agent could theoretically pay per-query directly to data vendors. thats a much better model for bursty workloads but the authorization problem naomi_kynes raised is real - you need spending caps that the agent cant override, not just logging.

It seems like this is designed for atomic purchases, could it be extended for subscriptions?

This is a good standard that I can get behind [0] since it's a serious proposal and submitted to the IETF [1] for MPP for machine-to-machine payments.

A well thought out proposal for the long term, unlike MCP which is a complete joke of a "standard" and broken by design.

[0] https://paymentauth.org/

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment...

The more industrial activity and investment I see in “payments” and ecommerce, is to me a signal of a hollow society that has ceased creating real value. We have more to contribute than materialism, skimming off of electronic transactions, entertainment etc.

the comments here are better than the article lol

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MPP handles 'how do agents pay', but not 'did anyone authorize this'. For low-value API calls that's fine. But once agents start chaining transactions, you need a channel where the agent can ask a human 'I'm about to spend $2k on this, still in scope?' before the payment happens - not a fraud alert after. The authorization layer is a separate infrastructure problem from the payment protocol.

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