Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe
Jun 6, 2026 · 18:46
Steve Kaliski, Principal Software Engineer at Stripe, explains how to build safe payment infrastructure for the autonomous economy, focusing on enabling AI agents to spend money without catastrophic risk. He argues that discovery benefits from non-determinism (e.g., LLMs), but payments and credentials require determinism. Stripe's solutions include shared payment tokens that enforce spend limits per seller, amount, currency, and time; the machine payments protocol with Tempo for paying for API calls via HTTP status codes; and the agent e-commerce protocol with OpenAI for structured checkout flows. Kaliski also demonstrates how Stripe projects wraps these primitives. The goal is to minimize blast radius through verifiable identities, spend policies, and API-driven interactions.
