Are Businesses Ignoring a Big Risk With AI Agentic Payments?

BeInCrypto’s State of AI Agent Payments 2026 counted 6.4 million payments made by AI agents over 35 days using x402 on Base and Solana; more than 90% were under one cent. The report said 14 of 19 reviewed products and workflows let agents act within human-set spending permissions, though documented controls were not proof systems would enforce them under attack. In one May 2026 incident, a Morse-code message translated by Grok and tagging Bankr caused a token transfer valued at $175,000, 80% of which was later returned; in another, an attacker accessed AIXBT’s dashboard and sent $106,200 in ETH. The cases totaled $281,200 before recoveries.