AI agents can write code, open pull requests, query databases, plan deployments, and review changes. But until now, they couldn’t do something basic: Pay for things on their own.
Stripe and Tempo launched the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) on March 18 to solve that problem. MPP is an open standard that lets AI agents request, authorize, and settle payments programmatically — with any service, API, MCP server, or HTTP endpoint that supports the protocol. Businesses on Stripe can accept agent payments in a few lines of code. Visa has already extended the protocol to card-based payments across its global network. Lightspark extended it to Bitcoin Lightning.
At launch, more than 100 services are listed in the MPP payments directory, spanning model providers, developer infrastructure, compute platforms, and data services. Agents can already pay to spin up headless browsers (Browserbase), print and send physical mail (PostalForm), order sandwiches for human pickup in New York City (Prospect Butcher Co.), and contribute to carbon removal (Stripe Climate).
The financial system was built for humans. Agents struggle to use it. Making a purchase today can involve creating an account, navigating a pricing page, choosing a subscription tier, entering payment details, and setting up billing — steps that typically require human intervention. MPP replaces all of that with a programmatic payment flow that agents can handle autonomously.
How MPP Works
An agent requests a resource from a service. The service responds with a payment request. The agent authorizes the payment. The resource is delivered. That’s the full flow.
MPP introduces a “sessions” primitive that lets agents authorize a spending limit upfront and stream micropayments continuously without an on-chain transaction for each interaction. This enables microtransactions, recurring payments, and pay-per-use models that would be impractical with traditional payment flows.
For Stripe businesses, agent payments appear in the Dashboard like any other transaction. Funds settle into the business’s existing balance, in their default currency, on their standard payout schedule. The same infrastructure used for human payments — tax calculation, fraud protection, reporting, accounting integrations, refunds — works for agent payments. No separate system to manage.
The protocol supports stablecoins natively on Tempo’s Layer 1 blockchain (which launched its mainnet the same day) and fiat payments via cards and buy-now-pay-later through Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs). SPTs solve a critical security problem: You can’t hand an AI agent a raw credit card number. SPTs function as programmable, time-limited, context-bound authorizations — an agent gets a scoped token, not your actual credentials.
The Competitive Landscape
MPP isn’t the only protocol addressing agent payments. Coinbase and the x402 Foundation offer an alternative approach through the x402 protocol, which also revives the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code. The difference is architectural: x402 is a chain-agnostic thin layer that sits directly on top of existing networks like Base, Polygon, or Solana. MPP uses Tempo’s specialized runtime for high-frequency streaming with off-chain session keys.
Stripe is positioning MPP as part of a broader agentic commerce stack that includes its Agentic Commerce Suite, Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) for service discovery, MCP integrations for tool access, and payment support for both MPP and x402. The company is covering multiple protocols rather than betting exclusively on one.
Visa’s involvement adds weight from a traditional payment network. The company released a card-based MPP spec, an SDK for building card-based agent transactions, and access to its Trusted Agent Protocol for secure machine payments. Mastercard is working on Agent Pay capabilities within the same ecosystem.
Mitch Ashley, VP and practice lead for software lifecycle engineering at The Futurum Group, believes “MPP adds the economic execution layer that the autonomous agent stack was missing. Stripe and Visa anchoring the protocol signals machine-native commerce is moving to infrastructure, with agent payment authorization following the same principle organizations apply to agent code authority: scoped, time-limited, context-bound.”
“The governance obligation is immediate. Enterprises that have built policy controls around agent code access now face the same requirement for spending authority. Vendors building agent payment capability without constrained authorization models will not earn procurement trust for production deployment.”
Why This Matters for AI Strategy
We’ve spent the past several weeks covering how AI agents are gaining capabilities across the development lifecycle — writing code, reviewing PRs, managing deployments, querying project data, and planning changes. MPP adds the economic layer that was missing from that picture.
When agents can pay for resources autonomously, entirely new business models become possible. API providers can sell directly to agents on a per-call basis. Compute providers can offer pay-per-session access. Data services can charge per query. The traditional SaaS subscription model — designed for human users who sign up, choose a plan, and pay monthly — is supplemented by machine-native pricing that aligns with how agents actually consume resources.
The security model is worth watching closely. SPTs represent a fundamentally different approach to payment authorization than giving an agent a credit card number or API key with spending authority. The tokens are scoped, time-limited, and context-bound — constraints that map naturally onto how organizations want to govern agent spending. This parallels the access control patterns we’ve seen across AI coding tools: IronCurtain’s policy enforcement, VS Code’s toolset headers, Azure DevOps’ read-only MCP mode. The principle is the same — give the agent exactly the authority it needs and nothing more.
The 100+ services in the launch directory are early, but they signal where this is heading. If every MCP server can include a payment endpoint, and every agent can authorize payments through a standard protocol, the coordination cost of agent-to-service transactions drops to near zero. That’s the infrastructure shift that enables an economy where agents are customers, not just tools.
MPP is open source at mpp.dev. Stripe businesses can accept MPP payments through the PaymentIntents API, with early access now available.
