AI agents, programs that act for you, have now made more than 138 million crypto payments on their own, buying data, computing power, and AI answers a few cents at a time. It’s the first big sign that software is spending money without a human clicking “pay,” and the most revealing number isn’t the total: US wallets made 88.1% of identified payments for AI models, while Chinese wallets made 0.1%. Here’s what’s happening, why that gap exists, and how much of it is really AI.

What Are AI Agents Paying For, and How?

An AI agent is an AI program that doesn’t just answer questions but takes actions, like booking a table, researching a topic, or running code. To do that, agents often need to buy things from other services: a…