- Jan Curn of Apify argued that AI agents have no town square or consumer protection agency to tell them which services to trust.
- He pointed to vetted directories and marketplaces as the likely fix, which makes whoever runs them the gatekeeper of trust.
AI agents that buy services have no good way to tell honest sellers from bad ones, said Jan Curn, founder of Apify, on the AI Engineer show. He expects vetted directories and marketplaces to fill the gap.
What was said
Curn walked through an agent payment funnel: need, setup, discovery and purchase. Trust sits at discovery. Once an agent has a wallet, he asked, where can it find services it can trust?
People built trust in markets in stages, he said. First they dealt with people they knew. Then came recommendations, like a friend naming a good barber. Later came marketplaces, town squares, reviews and consumer protection agencies.
For agents, those signals are missing. In his words, "But in the agenting world, there is nothing like that." An agent might find a service at a random web address claiming to offer perfect weather data. How would it know whether to trust it?
Curn saw two routes: a pool of services already known to be good, or trusted directories and marketplaces. He said he thinks this is already happening. He named Claude's directory of connectors, which he said Anthropic reviews carefully, plus ChatGPT's apps and Apify's own marketplace.
He also showed how one payment standard, x402, works. An agent sends a request and gets a 402 error with a payment-required header. It signs a payment and repeats the request. The server checks it with a facilitator, which might be Coinbase. Then the work is done and the payment is settled on a blockchain.
Why it matters
Our reading: as Curn described them, the x402 steps cover paying, not vetting the seller. A curated directory could act as an approved list that an agent draws from, so it need not judge a random web address. Then getting listed matters as much as a good product. Anyone letting an agent spend money is choosing whose list it shops from.
Curn did not argue that a few platforms will dominate. But the directories he named belong to the companies that build the agents, or to a marketplace operator. Their review rules decide who counts as trustworthy, so buyers should ask who sets them.
The other side
Curn spoke tentatively, with phrases like "I think". He also runs a marketplace, so he has a stake in marketplaces earning trust. He described the network route only briefly and did not say whether trust would concentrate in a few hands. He did not say who is accountable when a vetted service fails a buyer. He also said agent payments see almost no real use today.
Written by the WebPulse Newsroom with AI assistance, and checked by our editorial review: every quotation was verified against the recording's transcript. How we use AI.
The conversation this talking point comes from
- AI Engineer: Why AI Agents Still Won't Pay for Anything — Jan Curn, Apify (2026-10-18)
