Seven Answers to One Question: Who Decides Whether Your Agent Can Pay?

Ask who decides whether your agent can pay and you no longer get an answer about the moment money moves. The decision has moved upstream, out of the checkout and into an authorization artifact: a contract clause, a directory registration, a published scope, a minted token, a network enrollment. Whoever owns that artifact can meter it, gate it, price it, or pull it back. That is the ground this piece covers, and it sits beside three we published this week: the pilot wall, which asks who eats the loss when an agent buys wrong; the retailer readiness gap, which asks who holds the data agents need; and Walmart's rulebook, which asks who writes the terms. None of the three asks who owns the authorization decision itself.