Tollgate — Charge AI bots per request in USDC

AI labs are extracting billions of dollars of content from publishers with no workable payment recourse. The New York Times has been suing OpenAI since December 2023. Thomson Reuters won the first major fair-use ruling against Ross Intelligence in February 2025. Reddit is suing Anthropic. Getty is suing Stability AI. Cumulative damages claimed across AI training lawsuits exceed $100 billion. The other option is licensing — News Corp got $250 million over five years from OpenAI, Reddit got $60 million a year from Google. Those deals exist for the top 0.01% of publishers. Everyone else just bleeds. The payment rail to fix this already exists. HTTP 402 has been reserved in the spec since 1999. Coinbase and the Linux Foundation shipped the x402 standard in 2024. Circle shipped Arc with USDC-native gas, finally making sub-cent settlement profitable. What's missing is the publisher-facing product. Tollgate is that product. A drop-in middleware library for Express, Hono, and Next.js. A publisher dashboard at tollgate.brianmwai.com that provisions a Circle Wallet, configures pricing rules, watches realtime onchain settlements, rotates API keys, and off-ramps USDC via Circle CCTP. Every quote is priced by Google Gemini 3 Flash through Function Calling over three callable tools — agent reputation, site pricing rules, recent activity — with the reasoning persisted per request. A 5-minute HMAC receipt cache collapses 50 repeat reads into 1 onchain transaction. Proof: 240+ real onchain USDC settlements on Base Sepolia, all verifiable on basescan. A live demo publisher at demo-news.brianmwai.com with ten editorial articles behind real 402 responses. A bot CLI that signs payments and produces real settlements on demand. MIT licensed. Production ready. No waitlist.