Ethereum Foundation Launches zkAPI for Private AI Payments

The Ethereum Foundation and Open Anonymity Project have launched zkAPI on mainnet, introducing a way to pay for AI services without directly linking individual requests to the wallet that funded them.
The system is based on a design co-authored by Vitalik Buterin.
Users can prepay with $ETH or $USDC, then use zero-knowledge proofs to access AI inference and other metered APIs.
That allows providers to verify that a user has paid without tracing each request back to the original payer.
The model could reduce the amount of financial identity information exposed when interacting with AI services and other usage-based APIs.
This is especially relevant as AI agents begin making more autonomous transactions and API calls on behalf of users.
zkAPI shows how Ethereum infrastructure could support machine payments while preserving more privacy than traditional account-based billing systems.