Stripe

Stripe is the global payments infrastructure company that has positioned itself at the center of the emerging agentic web economy. In 2026, Stripe co-developed the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) with OpenAI, creating the standard that allows AI agents to discover products, negotiate prices, and complete purchases within conversational interfaces like ChatGPT — without users ever leaving the conversation.

The Agentic Commerce Protocol

ACP represents a fundamental rethinking of how commerce works on the internet. Businesses connect their product catalogs to Stripe's agentic commerce suite, which creates agent-readable endpoints with real-time product, pricing, and availability data. When an agent finds a match, it generates a Shared Payment Token — scoped to a specific seller, bounded by time and amount, and monitored by Stripe's fraud detection. Major brands including URBN, Etsy, Coach, and Ashley Furniture have already onboarded to the protocol. This infrastructure makes Stripe the connective tissue between the Model Context Protocol (MCP) layer where agents discover and interact with merchant systems, and the financial settlement layer where value actually moves.

From Payment Processor to Agentic Infrastructure

Stripe's evolution mirrors the broader shift from the Engineering Era to the Creator Era of software. In the Engineering Era, Stripe simplified payment integration for developers — replacing months of bank API work with a few lines of code. In the agentic era, Stripe is doing the same thing for AI-mediated transactions: making it possible for any agent to transact with any merchant through standardized protocols rather than bespoke integrations. This positions Stripe not merely as a payment processor but as critical infrastructure for the digital commerce layer of machine societies — the financial nervous system that autonomous agents use to participate in the economy.

Webshop Infrastructure and the App Store Escape

Stripe has also invested heavily in webshop infrastructure that enables game developers and app creators to bypass app store fees. With court rulings in the U.S. and the EU's Digital Markets Act opening the door for out-of-app purchases, Stripe's web-native payment rails offer developers a path to direct-to-consumer commerce at roughly 5% of revenue versus the 30% extracted by Apple and Google. This dovetails with the broader platform economics shift toward the open web that is reshaping gaming, SaaS, and creator commerce simultaneously.