Lightning Labs, the developer of the Bitcoin Lightning Network scaling solution, announced Thursday the release of a set of tools to allow the developers to create artificial intelligence chatbots that can send and receive bitcoins.

Chatbots such as OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT have taken the world by storm since its release in November 2022 with conversational capabilities and the ability to answer questions, act as a research assistant and produce computer code. Chatbots such as ChatGPT use AI large language models to understand natural language and produce human-like responses, which has led to their immense popularity. The platform reached 100 million active users just two months after launch.

Using the new tools, chatbot developers will be able to build bitcoin payments directly into their AI applications, the company said. The objective is to allow them to make payments cheaper, faster, easier and “machine payable,” meaning that they’re part of a network already designed to work directly with software.

Lightning Labs built its new tools atop Langchain, a framework for simplifying developing AI applications by combining LLMs with external data, and the L402 protocol, which is a Lightning-native authentication mechanism. Together these form LangChainBitcoin, a suite of tools that allows AI agents to directly interact with the bitcoin network to hold, send and receive currency.

“With the tools we’re releasing today, developers will be able to build more accessible AI infrastructure for both humans and agents alike,” the Lightning Labs developers said about the new tools.

The Lightning team mentioned the rise of intelligent AI agents that could act autonomously and would have to pay for their own resources and application programming interface calls. Having a protocol infrastructure, such as the Bitcoin Lightning Network to make payments, would make cheap, easy work for settlements.

“These agents will certainly need to pay for resources whether from gated APIs or paid sources of data,” said the Lightning team. “Plus, they will need to be able to effectively evaluate pricing signals to determine the most efficient path to accomplish a task. These payments, evaluations and decisions will lead to thousands of AI agents making countless micro-payments and micro-decisions a day.”

Examples of autonomous AI agents already exist and have shown to have surprising capabilities. One example is the open-source Auto-GPT, which is capable of automating a series of tasks to complete a goal such as building an app or doing complex research. These tasks can include using gated API calls and interacting with paid internet services.

With Lightning Labs’ tools, future autonomous agents such as Auto-GPT could be upgraded using the Lightning Network to easily authenticate and make their own payments for services and resources with bitcoin microtransactions.

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