Agentic Access: Introduction

x402 Studio enables AI agents to discover, evaluate, and pay for API access automatically, without human intervention.

What is Agentic Access?

Agentic access means your API can be called by autonomous systems (AI agents, automated scripts, bots) that:

  1. Discover – Find your API and understand its pricing
  2. Evaluate – Decide if the price is worth paying
  3. Pay – Submit payment cryptographically
  4. Access – Receive the response after payment verification

All of this happens in a single request-response cycle.

The 402 Protocol

HTTP status code 402 Payment Required was reserved for exactly this use case.

Client → Server: GET /api/data

Server → Client: 402 Payment Required + payment details

Client → Server: GET /api/data + X-Payment header

Server → Client: 200 OK + actual response

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