Stripe’s AI Shopping Lead Puts Card Giants on Edge

As AI assistants like Instinct and Meta Platforms’ Muse start to gain traction in shopping, Stripe has taken a leading position in how the agents pay. That’s putting the credit card giants on edge.

The reason for their apprehension: Stripe in many cases is enabling AI agent purchases through virtual cards for one-time use, which can leave card networks with less control over the shopping and payment process, people who work closely with the card firms say. Mastercard and Visa have developed their own payment technology for agent shopping that would use customers’ existing cards, giving the card companies more visibility into who’s making what purchases. That method is still at an early stage, though.

When people shop online themselves, they typically enter their card details or choose a saved payment method at checkout. But when an agent makes a purchase, it needs a way to handle shoppers’ payment information securely and use it across different retailers. Agents also need guardrails to ensure they don’t make accidental splurges.

Meta and Instinct both have found a solution to those needs in Stripe’s Link digital wallet, which securely stores the users’ own card or bank account details. To enable the agent making a payment, Stripe issues a single-use virtual card that has a spending limit tied to a purchase the user has approved. The agent never sees the users’ actual card number, and the card’s limit keeps the agent from overspending.

The merchant accepts the virtual card as it would any other card payment, while Stripe separately charges the user’s credit card to cover the cost of the purchase. That process creates two card transactions for a given purchase and can make it harder to connect the user with the actual purchase the agent makes.

One person familiar with Mastercard’s thinking said agents’ use of virtual cards has created concerns in part because it can make it harder for card networks, banks and merchants to track transactions from start to finish and resolve disputed charges. Card networks and banks rely on users’ transaction histories to spot risky or fraudulent transactions.

The use of virtual cards also puts Stripe in an advantageous position in AI shopping. It could gain more insight into people’s agentic shopping habits than the card networks currently can, since Stripe can see what people are buying through the AI agents it supports. And its early foothold could give it more sway than the card networks over how the technology evolves.

“For Visa and Mastercard, the biggest risk to their business is Stripe infrastructure becoming the default solution,” said Rene Reinsberg, CEO and co-founder of Self, a startup that offers payment logins for AI agents. “I think that’s even more pronounced with agentic commerce than the traditional commerce checkout flows.”

Shopping with agents is still in its infancy, but it has begun to take off with early AI adopters. Last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, for instance, told investors that more than a quarter of the 10 million users of Muse are shopping with the app, making commerce its most popular use. The average size of Muse transactions is over $200, he said. The demand for shopping with the app has so exceeded Meta’s expectations that it had to work with Stripe in the week after Muse launched to raise credit limits due to high shopping volumes, Zuckerberg said.

In another wrinkle, Stripe could switch an agent’s card to a different card network from the shopper’s original card—for instance, the agent might pay with a Visa virtual card that’s funded by the user’s Mastercard card. That could divert transactions and fees away from the card network for the shopper’s original card.

Stripe works with both Visa and Mastercard in its broader card issuing business, though it isn’t clear how transaction volume is divided between the card giants for virtual card agentic payments.

Visa and Mastercard, for their part, are promoting their own alternative to virtual cards by creating digital tokens tied to shoppers’ existing cards that authorized agents can use to make purchases. The tokens identify the end user without the agent handling sensitive card information directly. Both card giants are courting AI companies and merchants to use their respective payment systems, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay.

Visa, for example, launched a pilot with Bill and Billtrust, companies that help businesses manage or collect payments, that allows authorized agents to pay invoices approved by buyers. Visa and Mastercard also partnered with Anthropic to help merchants build their own AI shopping assistants using Claude technology.

While the technology is already in use in some transactions and pilot launches—and Stripe has added support for Visa and Mastercard tokens—adoption remains limited overall.

But the card networks may have an edge in winning over card-issuing banks to the token system. The banks are another crucial part of card payments and would be key allies because they control the approval that determines whether card transactions happen at all.

Last month, Bank of America and five other banks published proposed industry guidelines that appeared to favor the card networks’ preferred approach over Stripe’s use of virtual cards. The banks called for “auditable methods to enter payment credentials.” The banks didn’t call out virtual cards specifically as a risk, but they did warn about agentic payment methods that make it harder to connect a purchase to an actual shopper or merchant.

Stripe, for its part, says it has worked closely with its card network partners on its current technology. “Stripe built this [virtual card] capability in consultation with our network partners and will continue to work closely with them as standards for agentic commerce evolve,” a Stripe spokesperson said.

A Mastercard spokesperson said different payment methods could “coexist” as agentic commerce matures, but Mastercard believes over the long term that “the model will increasingly be tokenized transactions routed directly with the merchant.”

That approach “preserves the right information flow between the consumer, merchant and issuer, supports clearer dispute resolution, and allows the merchant of record to manage the relationship with the cardholder,” the Mastercard spokesperson said. Visa didn’t have a comment.