In September, AI agents using Stripe’s Link payment service made 38 times as many transactions as before, and the payment volume they moved rose 20-fold. Stripe hasn’t said what numbers those multipliers apply to.
Upstarts Media first reported the figures. The report says the growth began from a small base, and Stripe has not shared either the number of purchases or the dollar amount behind them. A small figure multiplied by 38 can still be small, so the growth rates say very little about how large the business is.
Dan Hill, a Stripe executive, said the volume is now starting to become significant. He did not give a number.
Agent count climbs from 70 to about 200
Around 70 agents were on Link when Stripe carried out its analysis. Hill said there are now roughly 200, Meta’s Muse and Grok Bot among them.
According to Hill, a typical agent transaction comes to about $100. Some users push their agents further, using them to book flights or buy furniture costing thousands of dollars.
Retail was the largest category, with 36 percent of transactions and 32 percent of volume. Travel was second, accounting for 28 percent of volume.
Your card number stays hidden from the agent
Link keeps your actual credit card number away from the agent. It creates a separate 16-digit number for the agent to use, and you can put spending limits on that number. Anyone letting software buy a sofa for them should set that limit before anything else.
Anthropic and OpenAI are both Link users, but neither uses it for agent purchases yet. So two of the largest AI companies aren’t part of the figures above.
Rivals on the way
Hill said Stripe won’t be the only choice for long, and he pointed to PayPal and Shopify’s Shop Pay as competitors.
He described the market as being in its very early days. Stripe hasn’t released the raw transaction count, so outsiders have only the 38-fold figure to measure it by.