Coinbase engineer: AI agents may end the most popular advertising business model on the internet.

CoinFeed reported on May 7th, citing CoinDesk, that Erik Reppel, Coinbase's head of engineering and founder of the x402 protocol, stated at the Consensus conference that AI agents could disrupt the internet's advertising-centric business model. He pointed out that the internet was originally designed for human use, and the current online economy heavily relies on revenue generated from human visits to websites and viewing advertisements, but AI agents completely ignore these ads. His proposed scenario is: if humans visit a website, they are shown ads; if an AI agent visits the website, it is charged five cents. Reppel believes this will drive the internet towards native digital payment models, especially micropayments based on stablecoins.