Stripe gives AI agents a checkout path without handing over card numbers

The hard part of agentic commerce is not finding a product. It is letting software pay without turning raw payment credentials into loose keys. Stripe’s new Link wallet for agents, launched on April 29, is designed around that exact constraint. Instead of giving an AI assistant direct access to your stored card data, Stripe routes the purchase through a controlled approval flow and hands back a payment instrument scoped for the job.

The product flow is unusually concrete for a category that often stays vague. A consumer grants an agent access to Link through a standard OAuth flow. The agent then creates a spend request, and the user approves it on the web or in Link’s iOS and Android apps. Once approved, the agent receives either a one-time-use card or a Shared Payment Token, or SPT, to complete the purchase. Stripe says the credential can be constrained by amount, currency, and merchant, and that the agent never gets access to the underlying raw card or bank account details.

That matters because Stripe is adapting agent payments to the rails people already use instead of waiting for an entirely new machine-payments stack to win distribution. Developers building personal assistants or shopping agents do not have to build wallet infrastructure from scratch, and Stripe says the system can reach Link’s base of more than 200 million consumers. The pitch is not abstract autonomy. It is supervised delegation: let the software do the browsing and transaction handling, but keep the user in the approval loop when money moves.

For now, that approval step is the feature, not a limitation. It leaves a clear audit trail and lowers the trust barrier for real-world deployment. Stripe also signals that more payment types, including stablecoins, are on the roadmap. The bigger question is how many purchase categories people will actually hand over to agents. But on the infrastructure side, Stripe has sketched a practical answer to a problem that has slowed the entire agent-commerce stack: how to let an agent pay without giving it your wallet.