Cloudflare launches Monetization Gateway for AI agent payments

Cloudflare has announced the closed beta of its Monetization Gateway, a new capability designed to allow businesses to charge AI agents for accessing digital resources based on actual consumption. This system aims to reduce friction caused by traditional subscription or account-based models, which are often incompatible with autonomous systems.

The Gateway enables an agent-native payment model where an AI agent can discover the price of a resource—such as a website, API, dataset, or Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool—and complete the transaction directly within the HTTP request flow. By utilizing the HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code, the system returns payment instructions as part of the request, eliminating the need for a conventional checkout process.

Cloudflare manages payment verification, settlement, retries, and analytics. Currently, payments are settled on the Base blockchain using USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. The technology is already being utilized within Cloudflare AI Gateway to allow customers to pay for AI model inference at the time of the request.