An Orla invoice now recognises two kinds of visitor. A person, who gets a payment page with the choices written out. And somebody's AI agent, which gets a price, pays it, and leaves with a receipt, all in the time a page takes to load. This post is about the second kind, and about the mirror image: an agent you connect to Orla can now hold a budget of its own and spend it inside rules you set.
Your invoice answers a machine
x402 is an HTTP standard built on a status code that sat unused for decades: 402, "payment required". A URL that supports it answers a machine with a price instead of a form. The agent pays in USDC and gets what it came for. No account on either side, no API key, no card on file.
Any Orla invoice or pay link priced in USDC on Base or Ethereum supports this, at the same URL a person opens as a page. There is nothing to switch on per document. The paying agent gets a receipt in under a second, and the document is marked paid once the transfer confirms on chain, which is the same rule every other crypto arrival follows: paid means the money moved, not that somebody pressed a button.
You receive the full amount the document states. The network gas is our cost, not a deduction from the payment.
Accepting machine payments is part of paid plans: Starter takes 25 a month, Pro 150, and Scale has no cap. The counter sits beside the invoice allowance you already have.
Your agent gets a budget, not your card
The other direction is an agent of your own: the one that watches your subscriptions, buys API credits, or pays for data. The standard way to give such an agent buying power is a real card pasted into a config, with a whole account standing behind it. We built the alternative.
An agent connected to Orla can hold its own stablecoin wallet, with an address on Base, Ethereum and Tron. You fund it with USDC or USDT on Base and Ethereum, or USDT on Tron. The deposit is the entire budget, and the budget is the worst case: nothing stands behind the balance, so no bug, no prompt injection and no bad day can spend more than you put in.
Inside that balance the fences are yours to set. Sends go only to addresses your space already trusts, under a daily cap. With a ceiling per request and per day, the agent can buy over x402 from other people's pages too. And a payment outside the rules is not refused: it becomes an approval request that names the payee and the amount, and your signature sends it from the same balance.
An agent can never sign a payment from your bank, exchange or wallet accounts. From those, the most it can do is prepare a payment that waits for a person. That is not a permission you could misconfigure. It is how agents are built in.
The books keep the line
Every payment an agent makes on its own sends you a notification: which agent, who was paid, how much, and how much of the daily cap is left. Reports break agent spending into two columns that are deliberately never added together: what the machine decided, and what a person signed. If agents are going to spend money, that line should stay visible forever.
Connecting one
An agent joins with an API key, or as an MCP connector in clients such as Claude and ChatGPT. Every new agent starts in observation mode, where everything it wants to write waits for a person to accept, until you decide it has earned the switch. Freezing an agent takes effect on its very next call, and the remaining wallet balance can be withdrawn at any time, free.
The full picture, roles, limits, the card side and what the reports show, is on the AI agents page.