Author: IreneDu

This is the 2.5th article in the Stripe AI strategy breakdown series.

The origin of this series is that on April 30, Stripe Sessions 2026 released 288 products, and I observed that Stripe is trying to become the economic infrastructure of the AI Agent era.

The first article, "Stripe is not a payments company," attempts to answer "Why Stripe" — its genes determine its ability to do this.

The second article, "KYC is Dead, Agent Economy is Rewriting Financial Regulation's Underpinnings," aims to dissect the future Stripe is betting on — what does the Agent economy look like, and why traditional payment infrastructure will fail completely in front of it.

However, during the writing of the second article, I received a comment from a colleague:

I completely agree with the first half. Whether it’s AB 316 or laws of any sovereign state, in the short term, it will not recognize "Agent as a legal entity" — the final defendant is always a specific person. This is something that Know Your Agent cannot change and will not change.

But regarding the second half — "the only change is in payment and settlement efficiency" — I reserve my viewpoint. The issue with this statement does not lie in the conclusion, but in the framework it assumes: it views KYA as an upgrade of the existing payment system.

This is what I think is worth writing another article to discuss.

Let’s return to a former payment practitioner’s muscle memory:

Payment forms are scenario-driven, not designed from within the payment system.

Every real leap in payment — online banking, mobile wallets, QR code scanning — was not because someone created a better product at the payment level but because a new transaction scenario emerged, breaking through the underlying assumptions of the original payment system.

New payment forms grow out of the infrastructure demanded by that scenario, rather than being optimized from it.

I once worked in Ant Financial on payment innovation. At a platform that used to create "Quick Payment," "Mobile Payment," and "QR Code Payment," the greatest joy and pain was pondering: what is the next generation of payment forms?

We did watch payment (as well as heartbeat verification instead of facial recognition), NFC payment (the original technology of "tap"), and participated in and wrote many "next generation" payment protocols, and even attempted to convince the boss to support my exploration of metaverse payment.

Most of these projects did not materialize.

Looking back, the reason is the same: we tried to define new payments at the payment layer, but the scenarios driving payment transformation had not arrived — without the scenario, the infrastructure required by the scenario cannot grow, and no matter how clever the design at the payment layer, it cannot bear it.

The Agent economy is the new scenario that I had been eagerly waiting for.

KYA is the infrastructure layer that is currently growing.

KYA is not a product at the payment layer; it is the infrastructure layer of the Agent economy.

The five layers of KYA that I defined in the last article — Agent Identity, Authorization Scope, Intent Signature, Responsibility Chain Audit, Credit Rating — only Authorization Scope and Responsibility Chain Audit fall on the payment chain, while the other three layers (Identity, Intent, Credit) are not part of payments at all.

• The Identity layer serves all scenarios that need to identify an Agent: cross-platform calls, regulatory filings, internal audits — payment is just one of them.
• The Intent layer serves the larger issue of AI alignment — payment is just one of its many verification scenarios.
• The Credit layer serves any system that needs to allocate permissions and limits to Agents — payment is likewise just one of the user types.

So the colleague's judgement "the only change is in payment and settlement efficiency," translated into infrastructure language, means: believing KYA is a subsystem of payment.

My judgement is the opposite: payment is actually a subsystem of KYA.

This reversal is the core discussion of this article.

Stripe's investment actions on the industry front line are precisely the empirical evidence.

Patrick Collison used the term "economic infrastructure for AI" at Sessions 2026, not "AI payments." This is not marketing jargon; it is a positioning choice. It indicates that Stripe does not intend to lock itself into the identity of a "payment company"; it is betting on being the foundation for the Agent economy.

Specifically regarding product layout:

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) co-built by Stripe and OpenAI is now being used by Microsoft Copilot, Meta, and Google Gemini (which joined in April this year) — it is essentially an Identity and Session Protocol, not a payment protocol.

The Shared Payment Token separates Agents from real card numbers, operating at the authorization layer, not the settlement layer.

Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge provides stablecoin infrastructure, the acquisition of Privy grants embedded wallet capabilities, and the in-house development of Tempo blockchain creates a settlement pipeline — this entire layout does not fit within the framework of "optimizing payment efficiency."

This investment portfolio only stands under the judgment that "KYA is the infrastructure layer." If the Agent economy were merely an issue of payment efficiency, Stripe would not need to create stablecoins, embedded wallets, or develop its own L1. What it is doing is methodically establishing itself within those five layers of KYA.

Emily Glassberg Sands, Stripe's data head, provided several numbers in her interview with Every in April this year, which corroborated the same point from another angle: a large AI client is blocked 250,000 times a week for fraudulent free trials; she has seen an AI company that incurs a cost of $25 for computing resources for each free trial and has a conversion rate of 4%, meaning they lose $625 for every paid user developed; and the overall abuse of free trials has increased fourfold in the past six months.

These figures collectively indicate one thing: in the AI economy, the real judgment that determines whether a transaction can occur and whether it is worth pursuing does not happen at the moment of checkout — it occurs upstream in the questions of "who is this, what do they want to do, and is it worth allocating resources." This is why Stripe aims to move the risk control Radar from "the moment of transaction" to "the entire user lifecycle": it is not about making old risk control faster, but about changing the focus from "is there a problem with this payment" to "is there a problem with the entire behavior of this user/Agent." The former is a payment layer issue; the latter belongs to the KYA layer.

Returning to that colleague's question: who is ultimately responsible?

He is correct — the final legal entity is still a certain individual. This has been confirmed from the legal perspective by AB 316.

But this is exactly the real problem that KYA is aimed to solve: when the responsibility chain becomes distributed, finding "which link specifically falls on which person" is something that was unnecessary in the KYC era but must be done in the KYA era.

In the KYC era, the responsibility chain is linear (user → payment/bank → merchant); when a transaction goes wrong, you intuitively know whom to find.

In the KYA era, the responsibility chain is networked (user → Agent platform → model supplier → payment protocol → bank → merchant, which may also involve other Agents), even if the law tells you to "find people and not Agents," you still do not know which person to look for — because the responsibility has been distributed among 5-7 entities.

KYA cannot change the ultimate legal attribution. But it can, within the networked chain, solidify each entity's role and actions using cryptography — who authorized what, who executed what, who settled what, who fulfilled what. Turning "unable to find evidence" into "able to find evidence"; transforming "which link had an unverifiable issue" into "verifiable."

This is not an enhancement of payment efficiency.

This is the first time accountability traceability can occur within the Agent network.

Therefore, the statement "the only change is in payment and settlement efficiency," in my opinion, conflates the infrastructure and functions.

The real occurrence is:

• Because a new type of economic actor (Agent) has emerged, a new layer of infrastructure (KYA) must grow;
• This layer of infrastructure redefines "who is on the other side, what can they do, who to go to when something goes wrong"; on top of this layer of infrastructure, payments will reorganize themselves in forms that we cannot fully see today.

What exactly will the next generation of payment forms be? It is what Stripe is trying to define as a new species but remains unclear.

But in this uncertain world, there is one thing I am very certain of — it will not be designed from the payment layer.

It will grow out of the scenario once the KYA layer of infrastructure is laid out.

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