Stripe Launches Three Agentic Payment Primitives
Stripe has unveiled a stack of three composable primitives for agent-driven commerce: Shared Payment Tokens (scoped, mandate-bearing credentials capped by seller, amount, and time window), Machine Payments Protocol (HTTP 402 pay-per-tool-call settling on-chain via Tempo or Base), and the Agentic Commerce Protocol co-built with OpenAI for structured catalog-and-checkout flows. Stripe Projects bundles all three. The governing principle: discovery can be non-deterministic; credentials and checkout must be deterministic.
Why It Matters
HTTP 402 as a pay-per-tool-call standard is the infrastructure primitive that makes agentic monetization possible at protocol level — whoever establishes this standard early shapes how agents transact across the internet.