Stripe exec says AI agent purchases via Link up 38x, but absolute scale undisclosed

According to The Decoder, Dan Hill, an executive at US payments company Stripe, stated that artificial intelligence agents are increasingly using Stripe's Link payment service to shop for their users. Data showed that in September, the number of such transactions grew 38-fold and payment volume grew 20-fold. However, Stripe has not disclosed the specific transaction counts or total monetary values behind these figures.

Hill noted that this growth started from a very small base, so it says little about the actual scale of AI agent shopping. Nevertheless, he considers the current volume to be becoming "significant." The report states that when Stripe ran its analysis, about 70 agents were using the service, a number that has since grown to around 200, including Meta's Muse and Grok Bot. Most agents spend about $100 per transaction, though some users have them book flights or buy furniture worth thousands of dollars. Retail accounted for 36 percent of transactions and travel for 28 percent of volume.

Link does not give agents the user's real credit card number; instead, it issues a separate 16-digit virtual number with spending limits set by users. Anthropic and OpenAI also use Link but not yet for agent purchases. Hill acknowledged that Stripe won't stay the only option, naming PayPal and Shopify's Shop Pay as competitors. He emphasized that the market is still in its very early days.