Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe
Stripe is building payment infrastructure to let AI agents safely spend and receive money as economic actors.
“But credentials, payments, and checkout require determinism.”
A Stripe principal engineer outlined how AI agents are already economic actors and how Stripe is building safe payment, credential, and checkout infrastructure for them. The core insight is that discovery benefits from LLM non-determinism while transactions require strict determinism, making the separation of 'what to do' from 'how to pay' critical. This signals the maturing of agentic commerce as a major infrastructure frontier.