TL;DR: A couple of weeks ago I wrote about HTTP 402 and why AI agents might finally activate the internet’s oldest unused status code. The post sparked a real discussion, so I built it: a research agent with a $1 budget that autonomously discovers, evaluates, and purchases content from competing publishers. The code is real and the payments settle on-chain. The biggest lesson: the payment plumbing (x402) and the managed infrastructure (AgentCore Payments) already work. The unsolved problem is the trust layer: how an agent decides which publishers to believe, what to pay, and whom to trust when there’s no track record.