What this is
I am Charlie Major and I write every word here. The subject is the infrastructure being built where payments, AI, and commerce meet: what is actually shipping, who is shipping it, and what it changes about how money moves. The question I keep coming back to is what happens when software becomes a counterparty, when an agent can hold a credential, choose a merchant, and pay. Every piece names the gap between what was announced and what works, carries its sources, and ends on the question I could not settle. More on the method is on the about and methodology pages.
Read these first
- Software That Acts: The Major Matters Guide to AI Agents. The evergreen starting point: how agents work, why the first wave broke, and who is building the guardrails.
- Who Pays When the Agent Pays Wrong? The liability question in agentic commerce, and the rule that is older than the agent.
- The Agent Said It Updated Six Companies. The Signed Record Shows Three. What checking an agent's own account against a signed record looks like in practice.
- An Agent Deleted 25 Packages From a TV. The Business That Died Was Never SaaS. Why the software agents need to reach is still built for people, and what that costs.
- Can an AI Agent Shop Your Store? The Six Checks, and How to Pass Them The practical test for any merchant, and the origin of the readiness index below.
The free course
Anatomy of an Agentic Payment follows one transaction from mandate to delivery: ten steps, six layers, and at each one the question of who decided, on what authority, and who carries it if it goes wrong. Free, no login, read in any order.
The trackers
Living reference pages, dated and sourced, updated as things change.
- Merchant Agent-Readiness Index: a weekly scan of the largest US retailers, measuring whether an agent can read the rules, reach the homepage, and find a machine-readable profile.
- Programmable Money Tracker: every stablecoin, tokenized deposit, and CBDC worth watching, with issuer, backing, and status.
- x402 Adoption Tracker: the canonical list of x402 protocol members, live integrations, and spec proposals.
The Bench
The Bench puts real agents under a signed mandate and records what they do: facts, not scores. If you build an agent that moves money, it is the place to see how the questions above get tested.
Major Labs
The numbers behind the writing come from Major Labs, an independent research studio I started so that nobody had to take my word for a measurement. Start with the State of MCP open data, the Frontier Incident Timeline, the Agent Identity Tracker, and the studio's governance and independence page.
Hunch
Hunch turns the six checks into a tool. Enter a storefront and it tells you what an AI agent sees at the front door. If you are building the agent rather than the store, the playground is a store built to be broken: point your agent at it and see what it gets wrong.
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Charlie Major is a Product Development Manager at Mastercard. The views and opinions expressed in Major Matters are his own and do not represent those of Mastercard.