SAN FRANCISCO & LONDON—Stripe today announced that it will be providing the financial infrastructure for a new AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) capability that enables content owners to monetize AI agent traffic.

When an AI bot or agent requests a protected resource like an article, a data feed, or a licensed archive, AWS WAF returns a machine-readable HTTP 402 Payment Required response. The response contains prices to access the content, accepted payment methods, and license terms. The agent pays to access the content. Coming soon, content owners will be able to receive funds directly in their bank accounts via Stripe.

“Agents are rapidly growing as content consumers on the internet: reading text, calling APIs, and querying databases. This presents new opportunities for businesses to monetize their valuable content and data while empowering agents to make more informed decisions," said Kevin Miller, head of payments at Stripe. "With Stripe and the Machine Payments Protocol powering AI traffic monetization, businesses can now quickly monetize their content, data, and APIs.”

"For agent payments to scale, they need standards for interoperability, the same way the web needed HTTP. We will be integrating Stripe into AWS WAF AI traffic monetization so any agent can pay, and any publisher can get paid, without custom integrations on either side," said Anoop Dawani, Director of Product Management, AWS Network Services.

For more information, please visit the AWS blog.