Payments. AI. Commerce. Decoded. 236 articles and counting.
Showing 145–168 of 236 articles
Plaid connected brokerage accounts to Perplexity Computer, an AI platform orchestrating 20 frontier models. On the same day, Truist expanded its Plaid partnership. Open banking is becoming the default data layer for AI agents.
Consumers want AI agents to shop for them. They just don't trust them to buy for them. Closing that gap is the defining challenge of 2026.
Marc Andreessen's "zero introspection" isn't a personality quirk. It's the foundational assumption behind a16z's entire AI investment thesis.
Google and Anthropic are both building comprehensive agent platforms, but their strategies are fundamentally different. One builds the infrastructure. The other builds the intelligence inside everyone else's infrastructure.
The US imported $450 billion in chips and computing hardware in 2025, up 60 percent in 12 months. Every chip crossed a border and settled through a payment rail. The AI boom is a payments story.
The SEC and CFTC issued the clearest crypto guidance in over a decade. For the stablecoin settlement layer being built for AI agent commerce, this is a de-risking event. But US clarity does not solve the global problem.
Walmart's exclusive data reveals conversion rates three times lower inside ChatGPT than outside it. The pivot to embedded Sparky is a masterclass in where value actually accrues in AI commerce, and a warning for everyone building on someone else's checkout.
Credit unions are positioning for agentic commerce. But the dispute infrastructure that protects 140 million members was built for a world where humans initiate every transaction. The gap hits harder here.
Nvidia's GTC announcements give enterprises a way to sandbox and govern AI agents. But compute-layer security and payment-layer trust are solving different problems, and the gap between them is where disputes will break down.
Payments rails, identity layers, and settlement infrastructure are all being retooled for a world where AI agents spend money. This week, every layer moved at once.
Harley Finkelstein says agentic commerce could make online shopping "merit-based." The numbers suggest merchants should listen.
The device intelligence platform launched the first open-source MCP server in the fraud space. Fraud analysts can now query device signals through any AI assistant.
Eight protocols. Six companies. Four layers. One quarter. The infrastructure for AI agent commerce shipped in Q1 2026. It does not fit together yet.
AI agents are running live transactions, settling payments over HTTP, and reshaping fraud at scale. The infrastructure underneath commerce is changing faster than the institutions governing it. Here is everything we published this week.
Coinbase built a payment protocol into HTTP itself. Cloudflare, Google, and Visa joined. The infrastructure for agent-native commerce is being laid in production.
In one week, Anthropic sued the US government, made long-context AI dramatically cheaper, and gave Claude the ability to think in pictures. Here is what it all means.
Fraud losses climbed 9.2 percent in 2025, and artificial intelligence is accelerating both the attack and the defence. The industry is in an arms race it cannot afford to lose.
FedEx plans to embed AI agents into more than 50 percent of its workflows within two years. The architecture it described tells you exactly where enterprise agentic AI is heading.
MCP gives agents hands. Skills give agents judgement. Most teams are building one and wondering why the other is missing.
OpenAI retreated from Instant Checkout. Shopify stepped in with "agentic storefronts" that let merchants sell directly inside ChatGPT. The template for how AI and commerce platforms divide value is now set.
Five weeks ago, we published The $650 Billion Squeeze. The argument was straightforward. Big Tech was writing checks that rivalled national GDPs to build AI infrastructure.
AI has made it easier than ever to publish. It has not made it easier to publish accurately. So we built a tool to close that gap.
The industry is building rails for AI agents to spend your money. It has not redesigned the system for what happens when those agents get it wrong.
Thousands of professionals are training the models that replaced them. Agentic AI may soon replace them again.