APEX: Agent Payment Execution with Policy for Autonomous Agent API Access

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02023v1
• Date: Thu, 02 Apr 2026 13:32:01 GMT
• Title: APEX: Agent Payment Execution with Policy for Autonomous Agent API Access
• Abstract summary: APEX is a complete research system that adapts 402-style payment gating to UPI-like fiat.<n>It preserves policy-governed spend control, tokenized access verification, and replay resistance.<n>Results show that policy enforcement reduces total spending by 27.3% while maintaining 52.8% success rate for legitimate requests.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Autonomous agents are moving beyond simple retrieval tasks to become economic actors that invoke APIs, sequence workflows, and make real-time decisions. As this shift accelerates, API providers need request-level monetization with programmatic spend governance. The HTTP 402 protocol addresses this by treating payment as a first-class protocol event, but most implementations rely on cryptocurrency rails. In many deployment contexts, especially countries with strong real-time fiat systems like UPI, this assumption is misaligned with regulatory and infrastructure realities. We present APEX, an implementation-complete research system that adapts HTTP 402-style payment gating to UPI-like fiat workflows while preserving policy-governed spend control, tokenized access verification, and replay resistance. We implement a challenge-settle-consume lifecycle with HMAC-signed short-lived tokens, idempotent settlement handling, and policy-aware payment approval. The system uses FastAPI, SQLite, and Python standard libraries, making it transparent, inspectable, and reproducible. We evaluate APEX across three baselines and six scenarios using sample sizes 2-4x larger than initial experiments (N=20-40 per scenario). Results show that policy enforcement reduces total spending by 27.3% while maintaining 52.8% success rate for legitimate requests. Security mechanisms achieve 100% block rate for both replay attacks and invalid tokens with low latency overhead (19.6ms average). Multiple trial runs show low variance across scenarios, demonstrating high reproducibility with 95% confidence intervals. The primary contribution is a controlled agent-payment infrastructure and reference architecture that demonstrates how agentic access monetization can be adapted to fiat systems without discarding security and policy guarantees.

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