Overview
Your AI agent resolves a task and needs to pay someone as part of that resolution — a contractor, a service, a counterparty. The agent makes that decision without a person in the loop, and it doesn’t need to know which rail the recipient is on. Atum is the payment tool your agent calls. Every payment still moves on a signature over that specific request. The agent decides; a signature authorizes. Where that signing key lives is the design decision on this page — see Who signs.AI agent developers
LLM-powered systems where payment is a step in an autonomous decision loop.
AI workflow builders
Payment actions alongside other tool calls — web search, data lookup, contract execution.
Platform operators
Moving toward autonomous disbursement where the system decides when and how much to pay.
Problem space
Atum solves:- Rail and wallet complexity — agents shouldn’t need to know which network a recipient is on
- Retry safety — idempotent tool calls prevent duplicate payments when agents retry
- Audit trail — structured receipts per payment, not raw transaction references
- Settlement blocking — asynchronous settlement so agents don’t stall waiting for confirmation
How it works
Your agent reaches a decision that requires payment and calls Atum as a tool — specifying recipient, amount, source token, and destination token. Atum routes it to the right settlement provider that moves the funds, then returns a structured receipt the agent can log and act on.This is for payouts your agent decides to make through Atum’s own SDK/CLI. If your agent instead needs to pay for an HTTP-gated resource or tool call — e.g. it hits a
402 Payment Required from another service — see Facilitated payments (x402) or Direct payments (MPP) instead, depending on which protocol the resource speaks.Who signs
The agent decides whether to pay. A signature over that request is what releases the funds. There are two ways to arrange that, and they are not equivalent.
If your agent holds the key, treat it like any other production signer: a testnet-only wallet while you build, and a scope you are willing to lose. The agent inherits everything that key can do.
If you need to establish who is answerable when the software spends — rather than letting the agent act as you — that is Know Your Agent. It is a separate question from identity on a payment (Atum ID) and from permission to move funds.
Shared responsibility
Atum handles payment execution — your agent handles the decision and the receipt.Try it
Try it (CLI)
Send a payment from your terminal in minutes
Integrate (SDK)
Add Atum to your agent’s tool layer
Next steps
- Build with the SDK — integrate Atum into your agent’s tool layer
- Using the CLI — send a first payment end to end
- Know Your Agent — who is answerable when software spends
- Payouts — human or batch-triggered payouts
- Atum payment lifecycle — from request to confirmation
- Facilitated payments (x402) — when your agent is the one paying for a gated resource speaking x402
- Direct payments (MPP) — same, for resources speaking MPP