Google brings stablecoins to AI payments

Google is building the payment infrastructure of the future.

Google is building the payment infrastructure of the future. The tech giant announced a new protocol for AI agents—and it’s opting for stablecoins.

In a statement, Google today unveiled the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open-source protocol for automated AI payments. It’s designed to enable AI agents to handle transactions securely. The system supports a range of payment methods, including credit cards, debit cards, stablecoins, and real-time bank transfers. The goal is consistent, scalable processing across existing and new payment rails.

To make this work, Google is partnering with more than sixty organizations, including Bank of America, Mastercard, and PayPal. In crypto, the company has teamed up with Coinbase (the U.S. exchange), as well as the Ethereum Foundation and MetaMask.

Payments run through so-called mandates: cryptographically signed orders that capture both the purchase and the user's consent. AP2 then executes them automatically. The data is collected by the AI agent, bundled, and sent to the merchant, who, thanks to the mandate, can verify that the payment was actually authorized by the user.

When AP2 will be launched exactly is still unclear. Google gave no concrete timeline in the announcement and did not say which countries will get access to the feature.

The explicit inclusion of stablecoins can be seen as a nod from the tech giant. Still, the move isn’t entirely unexpected: adoption of stablecoins is rising worldwide, while regulators are increasingly focusing on rules around this type of digital asset.