Stripe spent its Sessions 2026 conference last week pitching a future where AI agents shop on your behalf, and the company finally has the plumbing to make that less terrifying. At the San Francisco event, Stripe announced two products built around the same idea: Link's wallet for consumer agents, and Issuing for agents, the developer-facing API the wallet runs on top of.
How it actually works
An agent, say a shopping assistant, asks for access to your Link wallet through a standard OAuth flow. From there it can submit spend requests scoped with merchant, amount, currency, and a description of what it intends to buy. You get a notification on web or in Link's iOS or Android app, review the details, and approve. Only then does the wallet hand over either a one-time-use virtual card or a Shared Payment Token backed by the cards and bank accounts you've already added.
The agent never sees your raw card number. That's the pitch.
Stripe is upfront that this is the manual, training-wheels version. Configurable spending limits and conditional auto-authorization (let the agent buy under $50 from approved merchants without checking in) are listed as coming. Stablecoin support is also promised, no date attached.
The B2B side
Issuing for agents is the same primitive aimed at companies. Businesses can mint virtual cards for their own agents, with real-time authorization webhooks, spending caps, geographic restrictions, and per-session limits. Stripe is suggesting marketplaces use it to give sellers cards their agents can swipe for supplier payments and fulfillment, which is a tidy way to put agentic commerce on rails Stripe already controls.
This is the more interesting product, frankly. The consumer wallet asks shoppers to manually approve every transaction, which defeats most of the point of an autonomous agent. Issuing for agents lets a developer bake the controls into the card itself, with no human in the loop unless one is wanted.
Who is actually using this
Stripe says Link has more than 200 million consumers attached, a figure the company has been quoting in slightly different sizes for a while (one outlet's writeup of the same announcement put it at 250 million). The named example agent in Stripe's pitch is something called OpenClaw, which is not exactly a household name. Etsy and URBN have been cited as Shared Payment Token customers in earlier Stripe materials, but neither was announced as an agent-wallet partner this week.
The accountability question hangs over all of this. A wallet that issues programmatic cards on the say-so of software acting for a user is exactly the kind of thing that creates novel disputes when the AI buys the wrong concert ticket or a compromised agent goes shopping. Stripe's controls (per-transaction approval, spending caps, real-time auth) are reasonable. The chargeback flow when an agent goes sideways is less clear.
What's next
Link is live for developers now, with the iOS and Android apps already in the stores. Stripe has not committed to a date for stablecoin support or for the conditional auto-approval features that would make the consumer flow genuinely autonomous. Sessions 2026 wrapped April 30; expect more agentic commerce announcements through the rest of the quarter as Mastercard's Agent Pay and Visa's Intelligent Commerce roll into production with Stripe.
