OpenMind announces partnership with Circle to jointly build payment infrastructure for embodied AI

On December 2, it was announced that OpenMind and Circle have entered into a strategic partnership to jointly build the first payment infrastructure for autonomous, real-world embodied AI transactions. By integrating OpenMind's robot and agent operating system with Circle's USDC stablecoin and the x402 payment protocol, the two parties aim to enable robots and AI agents to directly pay for energy, services, and data in the physical world. As robots gradually become independent economic entities, they will participate in three core markets: 1. Task market: Robots perform tasks such as delivery and inspection to earn rewards. 2. Information market: Local sensor data and environmental state summaries can be sold to agents responsible for decision-making and planning. 3. Resource market: Robots pay for resources such as charging, storage, and tool usage, which are often tied to specific geographic locations. To operate smoothly across different manufacturers, owners, and networks, these agents require an interoperable, machine-native method of value transfer. USDC provides the unit of account and value carrier, x402 offers the underlying payment channel, while OpenMind's embodied intelligence system determines when, where, and how to pay. OpenMind and Circle regard this combination as a foundational primitive for the future robot agent economy, and plan to showcase more real-world deployment cases and integration progress—such as robots automatically charging and settling offline consumption—in the coming months, continuously exploring new possibilities in embodied AI, payment infrastructure, and autonomous services.