On September 30, payments giant Stripe announced it is helping OpenAI launch a new commerce experience called Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. 

The new “experience” will allow ChatGPT users in the United States to buy from Etsy merchants (and, soon, from Shopify merchants) in the chat using checkout powered by Stripe. The fintech giant also announced the release of its Agentic Commerce Protocol, an open standard codeveloped with OpenAI, to help businesses grow “in the era of agentic commerce.”

But beyond the impact to consumers, it’s also interesting to note that Stripe is going beyond this partnership with OpenAI. The company, according to Emily Sands, Stripe’s head of data and AI, is actively working to “build the economic infrastructure for AI.”

So what does that mean exactly?

In an interview with This Week in Fintech, Sands acknowledged that a big piece is pulling agentic commerce into the mainstream by “empowering AI agents to be able to transact safely and transact at scale on behalf of people and businesses.” Monday’s Instant Checkout Launch is a great example of that.  

But today, Stripe revealed some more product news, which went under the hood a bit more. In a nutshell, Stripe wants to help AI companies monetize their offerings. And not only those AI companies, but the companies that are leveraging those AI tools in their own offerings.

We all know that AI companies are growing fast. Earlier this year in its annual letter, Stripe outlined how the top 100 AI companies (by revenue) were able to achieve $5 million in annualized revenue in 24 months in 2024 compared to the top 100 SaaS companies taking 37 months in 2018 to reach the same milestone.

“I think of Stripe as the skeletal system for the fastest-growing AI companies,” Sands said. “And this AI cohort is the fastest-growing cohort of companies we've ever seen.”

Despite that rapid growth, there have been challenges around monetization.

And that’s where Stripe wants to come in.

Today, Stripe released the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)—a new open standard co-developed with OpenAI that already powers the new Instant Checkout. More broadly, Stripe says merchants can use it to sell through AI agents, and businesses can adopt it even if they don’t process payments with Stripe.

The fintech giant announced that it’s also working with other companies, including Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic, Perplexity, Vercel, Lovable, and Manus to “test its solutions in real-world settings to help businesses get ready for agentic commerce.”

Beyond ACP, Stripe announced new tools specifically designed to help AI companies monetize their products. Stripe Billing, it said, allows businesses to run hybrid revenue models that combine subscriptions with usage-based pricing, while a new API will let companies connect to LLM providers and track inference cost changes in real time. 

As Sands explains it, many services offered by AI companies are actually built on top of other LLMs.

“So they're using something from OpenAI or Anthropic or maybe a Gemini model, and they need to keep their pricing in sync, because the model costs, the inference costs, are changing relatively rapidly, sometimes by orders of magnitude up or orders of magnitude down,” she explains. “And if the final service price doesn't change, then they can end up underwater or getting beat up by the competition. So now, with just a few lines of code, AI companies will be able to track and price to inference cost changes in real time.” 

To be clear, Stripe’s token Billing product isn’t live yet, but is available in private preview today.

The company also announced that Stripe Radar is expanding in an effort to block “friendly fraud” types, such as the abuse of free trial periods.

“AI companies are facing different types of fraud problems than companies in the past,” Sands notes. “First of all, there was no compute to steal. And second, even if you did abuse a free trial, generally in SaaS, the marginal costs of providing the software are so low that it didn’t cost the company very much to have given you a free trial and not had you convert.”

But in AI, she points out, it's different because the marginal costs are much higher, bad actors can “rack up huge compute bills and potentially never pay for the service.”

With Radar, Stripe claims it can now stop up to 62% of trial fraud at the source.

Also today, Stripe announced Open Issuance, a new platform powered by Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company Stripe acquired at the start of this year. Open Issuance, Sands said, enables any business to launch and manage their own stablecoin with just a few lines of code.

“AI companies are going global super fast,” she told This Week in Fintech. “And so as a corollary, we're seeing AI companies really quickly adopting stablecoin payments, which are global by nature, on Stripe.

On that note, Brex coincidentally, today also announced its plans to launch native stablecoin payments.

With that launch, customers with a Brex business account will be able to accept stablecoins with automatic conversion into USD in their Brex business accounts and send stablecoins directly from their USD balances.