AI is consuming human knowledge. It should learn how to pay for it

When an OpenAI researcher told company president Greg Brockman about “a hack to get around nytimes paywall,” Brockman replied, “ah nice,” according to newly unsealed court filings in The New York Times’ copyright case against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The exchange is jarring. But it also reveals something about the AI economy to come: machines are becoming some of the largest consumers of human knowledge, and we have no working system for them to pay for it.

OpenAI and Microsoft argue their use is protected by fair use. Publishers disagree. Courts will decide. But the AI economy needs more than a judicial answer. It needs an architecture that preserves three things the internet is pulling apart: rights, credit and compensation.

One of the most practical pieces of that architecture may be an old idea that has finally found its use case: micropayments, powered by agentic payments.

An AI agent may need one paragraph from a newspaper, one data point from a research service, one photograph or one court opinion. It may need it once, for seconds. A monthly subscription is the wrong instrument. Free access is not a sustainable answer either.

Micropayments have existed for decades but saw little practical use. Transaction costs mattered, but the bigger obstacle was human: people do not want to make hundreds of tiny purchasing decisions a day, and the operational overhead rarely justified the revenue.

AI agents do not have that problem. They can make thousands of such decisions programmatically.

There is still considerable debate over whether agentic payments will become a major economic layer. In my work on agentic payments and the trust infrastructure they require, I have come to believe they will.

I have worked on both sides of the payments system: as a financial regulator and international standard setter, and as a C-level executive in the payments industry. I am now writing a book on what........

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