AI Agents Spending Money Online? New Research Says Not Really
TRM Labs found that most x402 payment volume is not clearly attributable to AI agents. It analyzed $52.7 million across 198.9 million settlements on Base, Solana, and Polygon since May 2025, then removed self-payments and anomalous flows. After filtering, only about 0.6%–7.5% of the remaining commerce by value looked like agent-driven activity. TRM noted that ordinary scripts, scheduled jobs, load tests, and self-dealing can produce the same on-chain pattern as agent payments, so protocol totals alone do not measure agent commerce well. The report estimated $25.62 million in likely commerce after additional screening, with USDC making up 99.6% of settled value. Activity later shifted from meme-token minting and a single AI-analysis service to an agent-payment router. TRM called for better agent registration, reputation data, and compliance tools built for high-volume small payments.
