Stripe just made it easier for AI agents to spend your money, in a good way. The company updated Link, its digital wallet product, so autonomous AI agents can use it to make purchases on your behalf.
Here's how it works: you connect your cards, bank accounts, and subscriptions to Link like you normally would. Then you can authorize AI agents to access those payment methods through approval flows. Think of it like giving your AI assistant a corporate card with spending limits and approval requirements.
This matters because AI agents are moving from chatbots to actual task executors. If an AI is booking your travel, ordering supplies, or managing subscriptions, it needs a way to pay for things without you manually entering card details every time.
The approval flow piece is key. You're not just handing over your credit card to an algorithm. You set the rules for what the agent can spend and when it needs to ask permission first.
For anyone building AI tools or using autonomous agents in their workflow, this is infrastructure that needed to exist. Payments were one of the last manual steps in otherwise automated processes. Stripe is betting that AI agents handling transactions will become normal, and they want to be the rails those transactions run on.
