AI agents are learning to pay for answers. A Swedish company wants to sell them the right one.

For twenty years, the answer to an open question was “Google it.” That worked when a person read the results and decided what to believe. AI agents now make those decisions themselves. They book travel, negotiate contracts, and buy services for their owners, and each action rests on information the agent has chosen to trust.

The Swedish company Silicon Islands AB is building a service for that moment and has named it to match the old habit.

In the AI era, the company says, you “ProofProfile it.”

What AI agents pay for today

When an AI agent needs something it cannot resolve on its own, it can buy an answer from another piece of software. The payment is usually a few cents, and no person approves it. A standard called x402 lets a program pay for a web service in the same request that calls it, and figures published on October 16 show how that market is being used.

The catalog listed 43,338 paid services from 2,452 providers. Over 30 days, those services recorded 906,040 paid calls. Nearly all of that activity went to a handful of services, and among those with any paying customer, the typical one had exactly one. A single service accounted for more than a third of all recorded calls. It charges about two cents to tell an agent whether a token contract is risky.

In practice, AI agents pay for one thing. They want a cheap, quick answer about a specific risk before they act.

The question ProofProfile.it answers

ProofProfile.it is built to be that kind of answer. An AI agent tells the service what it is about to do, what it stands to lose, what evidence it already holds, and how much it is allowed to spend. The service replies with a judgment. Either the evidence is already sufficient to proceed, or a further check is worth buying, and if so, which one and at what price.

The right amount of checking depends on what is at stake. Before a €50 purchase, a ten-cent check that halves a small risk saves about twelve cents, which is barely worth the delay. Before a €100,000 contract, a €5 check can avoid roughly €300 in expected losses. Most of the time, the service will tell the agent to stop checking and go ahead.

The decision itself remains with the AI agent or with the person behind it.

Where the evidence comes from

The service is an extension of ProofProfile.net, the company’s registry of more than two million artists and nearly ten million recordings. Each record carries a timestamp anchored in the Bitcoin blockchain, which anyone can verify and no one, including the company, can alter. The records were built from data collected before 2022, so they show which recordings existed before AI music generators arrived. The timestamp proves when a record existed and nothing more. It does not say who wrote a song or who owns it, and the registry makes no such claim. Music is the first testing ground because these dated records already exist. The company plans to apply the same method to other fields later, from software releases to purchasing.

Trial prices

Silicon Islands has set three price bands for testing.

1. Determining whether additional checks pay off will cost between one and five cents.
2. Running the recommended checks will cost between ten cents and €2.
3. A result with independent corroboration will cost between €2 and €25.

Larger packages for a single transaction will be quoted on a case-by-case basis. None of these prices has yet been tested against real demand.

How success will be judged

The company will count one thing. How many independent agents return and pay again because a check changed an expensive decision. The October figures show how rare that is.

Half the services with any paid use had a single customer, and most listed services had none.

ProofProfile.it is still in development. Before it opens, a controlled test of the registry must show that agents using it spend at least a fifth less on checks than agents who check everything, without making worse decisions.

The temporary website has no sign-ups or prices and links to proofprofile.net.