Stripe builds financial layer for AI agents with ACS and ACP

Stripe wants your AI assistant to have its own wallet. The payments giant has rolled out two interconnected products, the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and the Agentic Commerce Suite (ACS), designed to let AI agents conduct full purchase transactions on behalf of users without ever breaking out of a chat window. What Stripe actually built ACP, announced on September 29, 2025, is an open standard co-created with OpenAI and licensed under Apache 2.0. It defines how AI agents interact with merchant systems to handle the full lifecycle of a transaction: catalog browsing, cart management, checkout, and payment processing. The protocol is already powering real features. Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT uses ACP to let users complete purchases directly within the conversation interface. ACS followed on December 11, 2025, providing the merchant-side toolkit. It gives sellers a hosted endpoint for conducting AI-driven transactions while keeping them in control of their customer relationships, pricing, and sales processes. The pitch to merchants is straightforward: minimal changes to existing systems, maximum discoverability in AI environments. Early adopters include Etsy, URBN brands (the ...