AI agents are getting remarkably good at reasoning, planning, and taking action. What they have not had (until now) is safe, programmable guardrails.
Giving an AI agent access to your wallet is not a solution. Handing over private keys introduces risk that no guardrail can fully offset. And relying on human approval for every transaction defeats the purpose of autonomous AI. The result is a gap that has quietly limited what agents can actually do in the real world: they can think, but they cannot transact.
Hedera Agent Accounts are built to close that gap.
Introducing Hedera Agent Accounts: programmable, non-custodial spending accounts on Hedera that give your AI agent the ability to transact autonomously (paying for APIs, accessing data, settling invoices, and making purchases on your behalf) within a set of rules you define, enforced on-chain, with your private keys never leaving your wallet.
What is a Hedera Agent Account?
An Agent Account is a spending account you create for your AI agent, funded from your existing Hedera wallet. Think of it as giving your agent its own budget with strict guardrails; not access to your full account.
Using the Agent Account web app, you connect your existing Hedera wallet, assign an agent to the account, and configure the rules that govern how and where it can spend. Those rules (daily spending limits, per-transaction caps, an approved list of merchants and recipients) are then locked into a smart contract on the Hedera network itself. Not stored on a company server. Not adjustable by anyone except you.
From that point, your agent can transact autonomously within those boundaries, 24/7, without you needing to approve every action.
How it works
Connect your existing Hedera wallet
No new wallet to set up. Agent Accounts work with your existing Hedera account. You provision the account, assign an agent, and set an overall spending allowance; all from the Agent Account app.
Set your rules
Before your agent spends a single dollar, you define exactly how it can operate: a total spend limit, a daily cap, a per-transaction maximum, and an allowlist of recipients and merchants the agent is permitted to pay. These rules are written to a smart contract on the Hedera network and cannot be overridden; not by the agent, and not by Hedera.
Let your agent run
Once configured, your agent handles the rest. It can pay for APIs, access gated data, purchase services, and settle transactions; all without waiting on you. Any endpoint, merchant, or seller that accepts HBAR or USDC on Hedera can receive payment from an autonomous AI agent.
Inspect every action
Every policy, transaction, and agent action is preserved on Hedera’s Consensus Service, giving you a verifiable, tamper-proof audit trail of exactly what your agent did and what you authorized.
Your money stays yours
A few things worth being explicit about, because they matter:
Funds never leave your account until the moment of purchase. The agent does not hold a balance. It sends spend requests to the smart contract, which validates them against your rules and executes the transaction. Nothing moves until the moment a valid, policy-compliant purchase is made.
Your agent never sees your private key. Ever. The Agent Account system is designed so that authorization lives at the smart contract layer; your keys are never exposed to the agent runtime.
You can shut it all down in one click. If you want to pause or revoke an agent’s spending, you can do it instantly from your wallet. No support ticket. No waiting period.
Works with any agent, any token
Agent Accounts are backed by the Agentic Payment Services (an MCP server, REST API, and relayer) which means any AI agent that speaks MCP or REST can plug in. Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, self-hosted agents, custom-built runtimes; if it can make an API call, it can transact with an Agent Account.
Agents can pay in HBAR, USDC, or other Hedera tokens, making Agent Accounts practical for real-world commerce, not just on-chain activity. Agent Accounts are also compatible with x402 purchases, opening the door to a growing ecosystem of pay-per-request APIs and services.
For API and service providers on the receiving end: payments arrive from verified, policy-bound agents with cryptographic proof of user authorization. No chargeback risk. No signup friction for the agent.
One account per agent
Each AI agent you work with gets its own Agent Account with its own budget and rules. A research agent and a shopping agent do not share funds or permissions; they operate independently, within their own policy boundaries. This separation makes it practical to trust different agents with different levels of access without any of them interfering with each other.
For enterprise teams, companies can run their own Agentic Payment Services endpoint and manage agent spending at an organizational level; with delegated controls, team-wide audit trails, and compliance built in from the start.
What’s coming
Hedera Agent Accounts are coming to testnet in Q4 2026 for limited partner validation, alongside an early release of the Pay-per-API marketplace with initial partner endpoints. Public testnet access follows in Q1 2027, with mainnet availability targeted for Q2 2027, pending security review and legal sign-off.
If you are building AI agents and want early access, or if you run an API or service that wants to accept payments from autonomous agents, we want to hear from you.
Get started with Hedera Agent Accounts
Explore the landing page: hedera.com/agent-accounts
Request early access: hedera.com/agent-accounts/#early-access
Learn more about Hedera AI Studio: hedera.com/product/ai-studio
Join the conversation: discord.gg/hedera
Questions about integration or testing? Email us at ai-studio@hashgraph.com
