Stripe puts a human approval step between agents and Link's 200 million consumers

A merchant has to do nothing for this to work. After the consumer approves, Link returns the credential to the agent and the agent completes the purchase ^[18]. Stripe's stated reason for building it this way is that machine payments protocols are still gaining adoption, so agents need to work with the payment options sellers and consumers use today ^[12]. Nothing about the seller's checkout changes, because what arrives is a card payment on rails the seller already accepts ^[1].

More than 200 million consumers use Link ^[10]. But 200 million Link users are not 200 million agent grants. Each consumer has to complete an OAuth grant for each agent ^[4], and then clear each spend request one at a time ^[6]. A shopping agent that buys once a week for one person generates 52 approvals a year ^[19].

Stripe announced both products in its Sessions keynote ^[17], and wrote of the approval gate: "We're planning on expanding these controls to let people set spending limits, and choose when agents can act without additional approval" ^[9]. The plumbing for that already exists in the issuing layer, where permissions sit at the card level and fraud controls can be introduced at transaction authorization ^[15]. Once a person sets a cap and walks away, the live question is who picked the cap and who absorbs a purchase the person did not want. Stripe did not disclose pricing, nor any count of connected agents or transactions.

If the machine-native protocols win real merchant support, the single-use card is a bridge and the Shared Payment Token is Stripe's position on the far side of it ^[12]. If unattended limits ship and consumers set them loosely, the binding problem becomes disputes and liability. I lean to the second, and monthly approval-to-purchase data from Stripe would settle it faster than any argument about protocols.

The business-facing half is pitched at developers automating their own spend, fintechs embedding agent-issued cards for expense management, vertical SaaS platforms issuing agent cards to SMB customers, and marketplaces issuing cards to sellers so their agents can automate supplier payments, logistics and fulfilment purchases ^[16].