An open, internet-native payment protocol that enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, reviving the long-dormant HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code to facilitate machine-to-machine and AI-agent transactions.
At its core, the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) acts as a universal translator for the digital economy. It is an open standard, co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe and announced in September 2025, designed to bridge the gap between intelligent AI agents and the systems that power online stores. By providing a common set of rules,…
At its core, prompt injection is a form of “instruction override.” When you interact with an AI, you provide a prompt—a set of instructions or a question. Prompt injection occurs when an attacker inserts their own malicious instructions into that process, tricking the model into prioritizing the attacker’s commands over the developer’s original programming. Think…
Before MCP, connecting an AI agent to your private data or specific software tools was a fragmented, custom-built process. Every developer had to write unique “glue code” to make an AI talk to a database, a file system, or a project management tool. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) was introduced on November 25, 2024, by…
Note: This page covers tokenization in digital payments and blockchain finance—replacing sensitive data with secure placeholders and putting real-world assets on a blockchain. For tokenization in AI and large language models (breaking text into subword units like BPE, WordPiece, and SentencePiece), see AI Tokenization. Tokenization is one of those terms that sounds technical but describes…
The Visa Stablecoin Settlement Platform (VSP) is a set of tools and infrastructure that allows financial institutions-banks, payment processors, and fintech companies-to settle transactions using stablecoins on a blockchain instead of through traditional batch-processing systems. To understand why this matters, consider how cross-border payments have worked for decades. A bank in New York sending money…
Smart home payments are payments that connected devices in your home can initiate on your behalf—without you opening an app, swiping a card, or clicking a button. Your washing machine detects you are low on detergent and orders more. Your smart speaker pays your electricity bill when you ask. Your refrigerator restocks itself before you…
Multi-agent attacks are security threats that target AI systems made of multiple cooperating agents, where one agent’s action, message, tool call, or stored memory can influence another agent. In multi-agent systems, the security risk is not only that one model makes a bad decision, but that a compromised agent can spread bad instructions, false data,…
Shift from Chat to Action Most of us are familiar with AI as a conversational partner — a chatbot that answers questions or drafts emails. But agentic AI represents a fundamental shift. Instead of waiting for the next prompt, these systems are designed to execute goals. They break down complex objectives, decide on the necessary…
What is agent compliance? Key takeaways: Agent compliance is the set of regulatory, legal, and governance obligations that apply to organizations building or deploying autonomous AI agents—systems that perceive their environment, reason through tasks, and take actions to achieve goals without continuous human prompting. Unlike traditional AI compliance, which assumes a human makes the final…