AI economy may boost dollar stablecoin dominance, AMRO warns

Two economists from the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO) warned that the United States could cement a new era of dollar hegemony through stablecoins, powered by the artificial intelligence economy. The report from Chengxu Fu and Xiaguo Huang argues that the winner in the AI race will not be the nation with the most powerful model, but the one that establishes the currency those models and their infrastructure run on.

The economists laid out two channels for this dollar-AI loop. First, if companies pay for AI energy, data centers, and compute in dollars, and AI becomes a far larger industry, global demand for dollar liquidity will surge. Second, agentic payments – where software makes autonomous spending decisions – could become ubiquitous as AI displaces human-led logistics, inventory, and treasury functions. "Dollar-pegged stablecoins, in particular, could provide the programmable settlement that agentic commerce requires," they wrote.

The two channels reinforce each other. Agentic systems might settle AI-linked compute payments in stablecoins, creating a positive dollar loop that is hard to escape. Stablecoins, the economists said, benefit from early network effects. Tokenized deposits and central bank digital currencies are not yet ready to play that role.