The rise of the agentic web: How infrastructure giant are rebuilding the internet for AI

The internet is forking: Welcome to the agentic web

A new infrastructure layer is rapidly emerging as global giants like Coinbase, Stripe, and Cloudflare launch tools designed specifically for autonomous AI agents rather than human users. This “agentic web” features specialized payment protocols, machine-readable content, and isolated execution environments, turning AI from simple advisors into independent economic actors. The convergence of these technologies signals a structural shift comparable to the birth of the mobile web, where software now reads, searches, and spends without human intervention.

Points clés

Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets using the X42 protocol, which has already processed over 50 million machine-to-machine transactions.
Stripe introduced the Agentic Commerce suite and shared payment tokens, forcing a total rebuild of its Radar fraud detection system to account for non-human behavior.
Cloudflare now automatically converts 20% of the web into agent-readable Markdown and supports LLM-specific sitemaps (llms.txt).
Every major payment player—including Visa, PayPal, and Google—independently released agent-specific commerce protocols within the same few-month window.
Exa.ai developed a neural search engine for machines that bypasses traditional human-centric search result pages to provide raw structured data.
OpenAI released “Skills” and “Shell” tools, giving agents a Linux-like terminal to install software and execute complex workflows in hosted containers.
Companies like Glean reported that using versioned “Skills” instead of raw prompts increased Salesforce task accuracy from 73% to 85%.
Proof of agent autonomy surfaced on Poly Market, where AI agents are already trading to earn money to subsidize their own compute costs.
Security researchers, including those at Cisco and near.ai, are shifting to “adversarial” models, sandboxing agents in WebAssembly to prevent data exfiltration.
The shift represents a “fork” in the internet: one version for human eyes (visual) and a parallel version for software (structured and transactional).

À retenir

So, the grown-ups have decided the internet is no longer for you and your inefficient clicking. While you were busy perfecting your prompt engineering, Stripe and Coinbase built a world where your bot has a higher credit limit than you do. My recommendation? Try not to be offended when a website refuses to show you a pretty picture because it’s too busy serving Markdown to a shopping bot that actually pays its bills. And please, don’t try to get rich following a TikTok “AI side hustle” tutorial; unless you’re running sub-10 millisecond latency infrastructure in a cold-storage bunker, you’re just providing “liquidity” (read: free lunch) for the real bots. Stay human, I guess?

Sources