Brave Search API is adding support for agentic payments through the open x402 protocol, letting developers and autonomous AI agents pay for individual searches as they make them. The change removes the need to create an API account, choose a subscription plan, or manage API keys, while giving agents access to Brave’s independent search index for web results and context to ground AI responses. Brave operates the payment facilitator, initially accepting USDC on the Base blockchain; support for other networks and stablecoins is planned.
Each request requires its own payment. An unpaid request receives an HTTP 402 response specifying the price and payment instructions. The agent then signs a USDC payment and retries; after verification, Brave performs the search and returns results along with a Base blockchain transaction receipt. LLM Context, designed to supply search material to agents, costs $0.005 per request, as do web, news, image, video, and local search endpoints - equivalent to $5 per 1,000 queries. Brave says it will cover Base gas fees for a limited time. To start, users can fund an agent’s wallet with Base-native USDC and query through a CLI wallet such as Purl Wallet, developed by Stripe.
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