Stripe says AI agent payments via Link are growing, but gives no specific figures

Stripe says AI agents are increasingly shopping for users through its Link payment service. In September, Link transaction count grew 38x and payment value grew 20x, but Stripe did not disclose exact counts or amounts; the report notes the growth started from a very low base, making actual scale hard to judge. Stripe executive Dan Hill said volume has begun to become meaningful. At the time of analysis about 70 agents were using the service, and Hill said that has since risen to about 200, including Meta's Muse and Grok Bot. Most agent purchases are around $100, though some users have them book flights or buy furniture worth thousands of dollars; retail accounts for 36% of transactions and 32% of value, while travel accounts for 28% of value. Link does not give agents the user's real card number; instead it issues a separate 16-digit card number, and users can set spending limits. Anthropic and OpenAI also use Link, but not yet for agent purchases. Hill acknowledged Stripe won't be the only option, naming PayPal and Shopify's Shop Pay as competitors, and said the market is still very early. For developers connecting agents to Link for delegated payments, the key difference is that a separate virtual card number must be used rather than the real one, with authorization and exception blocking designed around user-set spending limits; since transaction count and value are reported as two separate metrics, scale should be assessed by looking at each separately.