Machine Customer
Also called autonomous purchasing agent, non-human buyer, custobot
A machine customer is software, most often an AI agent, that independently initiates a purchase, subscription, or other economic transaction, rather than a human clicking "buy." The term names an economic role (an entity that buys) rather than a specific piece of technology, which is worth separating clearly from two related but distinct terms elsewhere in this Lexicon: Machine Identity is the cryptographic identity a machine holds, and an Agent Passport (built on ERC-8004) is one concrete way of anchoring that identity on-chain so a third party can check it. Machine Customer is the buying behavior those two pieces of plumbing would need to make accountable.
The reason this term is getting attention now, rather than being a purely academic idea, is that the practical building blocks are starting to exist. An AI agent that can browse a website, read an API's pricing, and hold a wallet key no longer needs a human in the loop to actually execute a purchase: the missing piece has been a standard way for the merchant on the other end to know who's accountable for that purchase, whether the agent is actually authorized to make it, and what limits apply. Without that, a machine customer is functionally indistinguishable from a compromised account making unauthorized purchases (see Account Takeover), which is exactly the trust gap a checkable machine identity and a scoped spend mandate are meant to close.
Who actually built this
The term itself is most associated with Gartner analysts Don Scheibenreif and Mark Raskino, whose research beginning around 2022 and 2024 book "When Machines Become Customers" argued that machine customers would become a large and fast-growing category of economic actor over the following decade. That's market research and forecasting, not a technical standard. On the technical side, and built independently of Gartner's framing, protocols like x402 (created by Coinbase, now a Linux Foundation project, see that entry) and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) are being built specifically to let a machine pay for something at the transaction layer without a human approving each individual purchase. Solidus originated none of this, neither the market research nor either payment protocol.
Solidus today
Solidus has not built a "Machine Customer" product, and this entry describes an industry concept Solidus's own technology partially, and only partially, feeds into, not something shipped under that name. The pieces that exist: Machine Identity gives a non-human subject its own did:solidus identifier (testnet, unaudited); Agent Passport anchors that identity to an ERC-8004 record on-chain, with exactly one real, live example running on a public testnet, not a repeatable product; and Solidus Agents issues an AP2-aligned spend-mandate credential. A live testnet service establishing what an agent may spend and on whose behalf (see Agent Onboarding and x402). What's missing is the other half of an actual purchase: a settlement facilitator that takes a mandate and an x402 payment request and clears it. That piece, pay.solidus.network, does not currently resolve. No agent, wallet, or merchant has used any part of this in a real transaction. A machine customer buying something and proving, end to end, that it was authorized to is a description of the intended shape of these pieces fitting together, not something that has happened yet.
See also
Machine Identity is the underlying cryptographic identity a machine customer would hold. Agent Passport and ERC-8004 are the concrete on-chain anchoring mechanism behind it. Agent Onboarding is the broader process of establishing an agent's accountability and authorization before it acts, which a machine customer's purchasing authority is one instance of. x402 is the payment-settlement protocol a machine customer's actual purchase would need to clear through, and the entry where the "not shipped yet" half of this story is documented in the most detail.
Where it comes from
Someone else specified this. Solidus assembles it.
"Machine customer" is a market-research term, not a technology Solidus or anyone else builds directly. It was popularized by Gartner analysts Don Scheibenreif and Mark Raskino, who researched and wrote about machine customers, algorithms and connected devices that autonomously negotiate, purchase, and pay for goods and services on a person's or business's behalf, starting around 2022, and later published the book "When Machines Become Customers" (Wiley, 2024), projecting the category would grow into a major and fast-growing share of overall economic activity. Separately, and independently of that research, payment-rail-level standards are being built for the same underlying shift: the x402 protocol (see that entry) and the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) both aim to let a machine pay for something without a human approving each transaction. Solidus did not coin "machine customer," and did not build Gartner's research, x402, or AP2: it composes an identity and credential layer that a real machine-customer payment flow would need in order to prove who's accountable for an autonomous purchase.
How to check this
Solidus has not built this. The entry explains the concept.
None specific to a completed machine-customer purchase flow. See Machine Identity and Agent Passport for the individual, checkable pieces that exist today; see x402 for why the payment-settlement half specifically does not exist yet.