AI-driven payment activity is accelerating as crypto traders use AI models to execute trades, with Artemis data showing agentic-payment activity through protocols such as x402 and the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) surging in recent months. Transactions crossed 2 million during several periods in late August and early September, and daily agentic-payment volume approached $70,000 at its peak in the period shown on Artemis' three-month dashboard. Coinbase data shows Grok generated 25.31% of notional agentic trading volume last week, the largest named AI client, followed by Perplexity at 21.61%, Claude at 8% and ChatGPT at 6.13%. The ranking changed significantly in just one week: Perplexity previously accounted for 26.8%, Claude 19.3%, Grok 15.3% and ChatGPT 1.1%. Grok gained almost 10 percentage points in a week, while ChatGPT's share increased by more than five times. Coinbase attributed Grok's jump to its Coinbase for Agents x Grok integration. Custom CLI and other interfaces accounted for 38.47% of notional trading volume last week, the largest category, up from 36.8% previously, suggesting developers are building customized agentic trading workflows rather than relying solely on off-the-shelf AI assistants. Arthur Hayes has argued AI agents will eventually need a currency tied directly to compute.