Coinbase, the largest US cryptocurrency exchange, on Thursday unveiled a product that lets AI agents trade and make payments directly from a user's account, within limits the user sets.
Called Coinbase for Agents, the tool connects an outside AI agent to a user's account so it can both reason about finances and execute trades, according to a press release. It's available now as an MCP integration for web agents like ChatGPT or Claude, and as a command-line interface (CLI) tool for terminals such as Claude Code.
Users can task an agent with rebalancing a portfolio toward a target allocation, placing limit orders if prices drop or putting idle cash to work, the company said. Agents can also pay for premium data to inform trades, with Coinbase's x402 payments protocol coming soon.
An agent can run inside an isolated portfolio with no view of a user's other holdings, or use the main account, and users will soon be able to set rules like maximum trade size and spending caps, Coinbase said. The company compared it to giving a gift card rather than handing over a bank account.
Payments use the same monitoring and know-your-transaction checks as the rest of Coinbase, it said. Crypto spot and derivatives trading work now, with stocks, prediction markets and commodities planned.
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The first draft of this story was written on Claude Desktop using a custom skill designed to handle press-release rewrites. I then used Distro Publisher, our MCP server, to file a draft directly to DeAI News, and then used the DistroVerse editing interface to make some edits, and I personally checked all the facts prior to publication.)