AWS WAF Lets Publishers Charge AI Bots for Content via HTTP 402

Amazon Web Services / Hacker News·medium signal

AWS WAF added AI traffic monetization that returns an HTTP 402 'Payment Required' response with a machine-readable price manifest using the x402 protocol, letting content owners charge AI crawlers per request by path, bot category, or verification tier — with payments collected in USDC stablecoins to a wallet. AWS notes AI bots now exceed 50% of web traffic for many providers, with AI crawlers up 300%+ year-over-year. This is concrete infrastructure for the emerging machine-to-machine payment economy builders can integrate today.