buyer
A buyer is the party whose money is spent. x402 names the software that pays — the client — and says nothing about who stands behind it. That is why the other agentic-payments specifications treat the buyer and the agent as separate roles.
x402 defines the paying side as a position in the exchange: the client is the entity wanting to pay for a resource. It is what signs an authorization against the terms the endpoint quoted. Whether a person authorised that spend, and how, sits outside the protocol.
The commerce protocols make the separation explicit because they have to. The Agentic Commerce Protocol describes flows between buyers, AI agents and businesses — three parties, not two. AP2 puts the capture of a person's informed consent on a role of its own, apart from the shopping agent that performs the purchase. The consent is recorded somewhere the agent is not.
For a record of endpoints the consequence is narrow and worth stating: an endpoint sees a client, not a buyer. What a reading of an endpoint can show is the terms that were offered to whoever asked.
→ probe402 is the asking party in every reading it publishes, and what each endpoint answered it is on the record at the endpoint list.
Sources
- The x402 specification repositoryx402 Foundation
- The Agentic Commerce ProtocolAgentic Commerce Protocol
- The AP2 specificationAgent Payments Protocol
Related agent · seller · machine payment