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Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe
Takeaway
Keep payment authority in deterministic, auditable infrastructure with narrowly scoped credentials and enforced spending limits.
Summary
- Stripe separates nondeterministic product discovery from deterministic credentials, payment authorization, and checkout.
- Agent purchasing risks include choosing the wrong merchant or item, spending the wrong amount, and exposing or misusing credentials.
- Shared payment tokens bind credentials to a seller with amount, currency, and expiry restrictions enforced by Stripe across payment methods.
- A demo rejects a $50 payment against a $25 token limit, while preserving payment metadata for the seller’s existing risk checks.
agent-paymentsstripepayment-tokens
Original description
Agents are evolving from calling free APIs to executing real transactions, creating a new challenge: how do we let software spend money autonomously without catastrophic risk? This talk presents Stripe's approach to solving the dual problems of secure credential transmission and making businesses discoverable to agents. Through live code examples, we'll explore how to build guardrails that make autonomous spend safe and examine what infrastructure is needed as agents purchasing becomes a core capability. Whether you're building agent frameworks or enabling your business to work with agents, you'll learn how to make agent transactions both powerful and safe. Speaker info: / steve-kaliski-079a7710 https://x.com/stevekaliski