Sui and Alibaba Cloud plan to let AI agents pay for cloud services within human-set budgets without approval for every purchase. The firms announced the plan at Sui Basecamp, the network's annual conference in Singapore. Alibaba Cloud services would integrate with Sui Agent Payments, Sui's toolkit for AI agent payments. Agents would pay for each request as they use a service. Neither firm has disclosed a launch date, pricing or which services would be available first.
The approach builds on a model documented in BeInCrypto's State of AI Agent Payments 2026 report. The report reviewed 19 products and agentic workflows. The report found that 14 could act within human-set limits without requiring approval every time. Card checkouts assume a person confirms every purchase. However, the planned model would let software determine the pace of spending within human-defined limits.
Sui and Alibaba Cloud have not explained how users would instruct their agents beyond setting a budget. A spending cap limits how much an agent can pay, but not how the agent spends. An agent stuck repeatedly sending the same paid request could exhaust its entire budget because each request would settle automatically. Neither firm has said whether the system would include rate limits or alerts to prevent that.
Mysten Labs, the developer behind Sui, organized this year's event around the agentic economy. Mysten Labs co-founder Adeniyi Abiodun outlined the thesis ahead of the conference. Abiodun said economic activity is shifting from people confirming purchases to agents transacting on people's behalf continuously and at machine speed.
Rival blockchain networks are pursuing the same market. Cardano joined the x402 standard in September. The standard lets agents pay online services in ADA. A BlackRock research paper identified stablecoins as the leading candidate for money used directly by machines. BeInCrypto price data shows that Sui's native token, SUI, has gained about 43% over the past month. Other cloud providers may face pressure to follow if Sui and Alibaba Cloud bring per-request stablecoin payments to large-scale use.