Ripple is joining the Linux Foundation’s new payments standards project, accelerating efforts to expand XRP and stablecoin RLUSD as payments infrastructure for the AI era. The move targets an environment in which AI agents pay service fees on their own without human intervention.

On July 14 local time, blockchain outlet U.Today reported that Ripple joined the Linux Foundation’s newly launched x402 Foundation as a premier member. The x402 Foundation will develop and operate the open payments standard x402 protocol, allowing AI agents, applications and APIs to exchange payments directly over HTTP.

x402 aims to build an environment in which payments happen as naturally as data moves across the internet. It focuses on standardising machine-to-machine payments, in which AI agents call other AI services or APIs and pay required costs in real time.

Ripple said it has already integrated x402 support into the XRP Ledger (XRPL). This allows AI agents to automatically pay service fees using XRP and RLUSD, and Ripple plans to take part in the x402 Foundation’s governance and technical development.

More than 40 companies and institutions are participating in the foundation, including Ripple, Amazon Web Services (AWS), American Express, Circle, Coinbase, Google, Mastercard, Shopify, the Solana Foundation, the Stellar Development Foundation, Stripe and Visa. It shows that discussions on AI payments standards are spreading beyond the blockchain industry to global big tech and the broader financial and payments sectors.

Ripple stressed that the XRP Ledger has a structure suited to payments between AI agents. It said predictable transaction finality and a simple fee structure can provide a stable payments environment for autonomous AI systems that repeatedly make decisions in seconds.

Reece Cooper (재지 쿠퍼), senior developer relations engineer at RippleX, pointed out that current discussions in the AI industry focus only on agents’ capabilities. "Most discussions around agentic payments stay on what the AI can do," he said. "The harder problem is: how does the AI actually pay for the service on its own?"

Cooper assessed that the XRP Ledger has already solved much of that problem. "In XRPL this is already a solved problem," he said, citing "deterministic finality within 3 to 5 seconds, a structure without gas auctions, and no ambiguous pending state" as key advantages for machine-to-machine payments.

He also cited development efficiency as a strength. Because the next step can proceed as soon as a transaction is final, retry logic or repeated polling is not necessary. "A system where a person clicks an approve button and a system for a machine making decisions in milliseconds are fundamentally different in how they are designed," Cooper added.

Ripple plans to link the XRPL AI Starter Kit it released last month with this x402 support to expand the AI developer ecosystem. As competition intensifies to automate payments between AI services, Ripple is strengthening a strategy to take the lead in payments infrastructure for the AI era by pushing XRP and RLUSD.