Technical deep dive: AgentCore payments and innovation in agentic commerce

For secure authentication of payment wallets, AgentCore payments uses [AgentCore Identity](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/identity-overview.html). Developers create a payment connector, which is a payment provider-specific integration resource. This automatically provisions a payment credential provider in AgentCore Identity, which stores payment credentials in a secure token vault and mints tokenized access tokens without exposing raw credentials. This credential provider is specifically designed for high-performance, secure digital signatures. It supports `EdDSA`, `ECDSA`, and `ES256` for wallet operations with payment providers. The cryptographic material lives in AWS Secrets Manager and isn’t returned from APIs. Each payment connector is associated with a unique AgentCore workload identity. The workload identity is used to obtain a workload-scoped, one-time-use access token from the AgentCore credential provider system. The cryptographic binding between workload identity and user context provides multi-tenant isolation.

On the inbound side, the service enforces dual authentication, OAuth and AWS SigV4, within the same request pipeline for accessing AgentCore payments APIs, providing a flexible security layer. For OAuth invocations, the inbound bearer token is validated against AgentCore Identity, and JWT claims are extracted to derive user identity for downstream operations. For SigV4, the request signature is validated using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

![Image 2: Diagram showing AgentCore Payments using AgentCore Identity to securely store payment credentials in AWS Secrets Manager and issue scoped, one-time-use access tokens to agents.](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2026/05/21/ML-21056-2.png)

_Figure 2: Secure credential storage for AgentCore payments and AgentCore Identity._

### Which payment protocol should I pick, and what do I need to build on top of it?

The agentic payments landscape is fragmented across numerous competing protocols, leaving developers overwhelmed and unclear on which one fits their specific use case. Ramping up on a single protocol demands significant time and effort because each comes with its own nuances (versioning, authentication flows, transaction models) that developers must understand before building anything production-ready. Beyond protocol selection, developers must also construct their own abstraction layer to handle these complexities. The effort compounds as the permutations grow: building across multiple wallet providers (each with different auth and wallet APIs), payment networks, and protocols turns what seems like a single integration into a sprawling matrix of combinations.

To address this, AgentCore payments supports payment orchestration, a core engine purpose-built to power the complexities of agentic payments. It sits between your AI agent and payment providers, exposing a single `processPayment` interface that takes a payment request and returns a payment proof that an agent can present to access paid services. AgentCore payments abstracts protocol complexity by automatically managing multi-step payment flows, retries, and edge cases across popular agentic payment protocols like x402. It handles variations across protocol versions (for example, x402 v1 and v2 differ in how payment requirements are structured and what fields are expected), transforming those into crypto-network-specific transaction data, implementing payment proof generation algorithms, and signing transactions securely through provider APIs while enforcing the spend limits you configured. The orchestrator is architected around a pluggable model where each payment protocol and provider is implemented as an independent interface. This means adding support for a new protocol doesn’t require changes to the core orchestration logic or the developer-facing API. Developers continue calling the same `processPayment` interface, and the orchestrator routes to the right connector and protocol handler based on the payment requirements.

![Image 3: Diagram of the AgentCore Payments orchestration engine routing a single processPayment call to different connectors and protocol handlers based on payment requirements.](https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/f1f836cb4ea6efb2a0b1b99f41ad8b103eff4b59/2026/05/21/ML-21056-3.png)

_Figure 3: AgentCore payments payment orchestration engine._

### How do I verify that my agent doesn’t go off the rails in spending?

Agents are autonomous by nature, which means unconstrained spending is a real possibility. Developers need mechanisms to enforce spending limits in real time, deterministically, so an agent operating on behalf of a user or business can’t exceed predefined budgets, whether at the session level or user level. Without these guardrails, a single runaway agent interaction could result in significant unintended costs.

from bedrock_agentcore.payments import PaymentClient

# 创建 PaymentClient
payment_client = PaymentClient(region_name="us-west-2")

# 使用连接器和凭证提供程序创建支付管理器
response = payment_client.create_payment_manager_with_connector(
    payment_manager_name="myPaymentManager",
    payment_manager_description="myPaymentManager description",
    authorizer_type="AWS_IAM",
    role_arn=ROLE_ARN,
    payment_connector_config={
        "name": "myPaymentConnector",
        "description": "myPaymentConnector description",
        "payment_credential_provider_config": {
            "name": "myCoinbasePaymentCredential",
            "credential_provider_vendor": "<PROVIDER>",
            "credentials": {
                "api_key_id": API_KEY,
                "api_key_secret": API_KEY_SECRET,
                "wallet_secret": WALLET_SECRET,
            },
        },
    }
)

# 从响应中提取详细信息
payment_manager_arn = response["paymentManager"]["paymentManagerArn"]
payment_connector_id = response["paymentManager"]["paymentConnectorId"]

from bedrock_agentcore.payments import PaymentManager

# 初始化管理器
manager = PaymentManager(
    payment_manager_arn=payment_manager_arn,
    region_name="us-west-2"
)
instrument = manager.create_payment_instrument(
    user_id="test-user-123",
    payment_connector_id="codeverifymycoinbaseconnector-sfp0lynfjc",
    payment_instrument_type="EMBEDDED_CRYPTO_WALLET",
    payment_instrument_details={
        "embeddedCryptoWallet": {
            "network": "ETHEREUM",
            "linkedAccounts": [{
                "email": {
                    "emailAddress": "test@example.com"
                }
            }]
        }
    },
)

# 创建一个支付会话
session_response = manager.create_payment_session(
    user_id="test-user-123",
    limits={
        "maxSpendAmount": {
            "value": "100.00",
            "currency": "USD"
        }
    },
    expiry_time_in_minutes=60
)

payment_response = manager.process_payment(
    user_id="user-123",
    payment_session_id=PAYMENT_SESSION_ID,
    payment_instrument_id=PAYMENT_INSTRUMENT_ID,
    payment_input={
        "cryptoX402": {
            "version": "1",
            "payload": {
                "scheme": "exact",
                "network": "base-sepolia",
                "maxAmountRequired": "5000",
                "resource": "https://premiousEndpoint",
                "description": "Premium AI joke generation",
                "mimeType": "application/json",
                "payTo": PAY_TO_ADDRESS,
                "maxTimeoutSeconds": 300,
                "asset": "0xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx",
                "extra": {"name": "USDC", "version": "2"},
            },
        }
    }
)

*   [AgentCore 支付文档](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/payments.html)
*   [AgentCore 支付 FSI 参会者大会主旨演讲](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQpTC2PcWbI&t=3421s)
*   [AgentCore 支付示例：教程和端到端用例模式](https://github.com/awslabs/agentcore-samples/tree/main/06-workshops/13-AgentCore-payments)
*   [Amazon Bedrock AgentCore 文档](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/what-is-bedrock-agentcore.html)，探索网关、内存、工具和运行时，并扩展您的代理功能。

[AgentCore 支付](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/agents-that-transact-introducing-amazon-bedrock-agentcore-payments-built-with-coinbase-and-stripe/) 现正处于预览阶段。开始构建能够进行交易的代理。

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