Stripe says agent purchases on Link grew 38x in September

Payments company Stripe says purchases made by AI assistants through its Link wallet grew 38 times in September, with payment volume up 20 times, according to data it shared with Upstarts Media. Stripe has not released the underlying number of purchases or total dollars, and the report notes the growth started from a small base, so it says little about the real scale. About 70 agents were on Link when Stripe ran the numbers, a figure its consumer product lead Dan Hill says has since risen to around 200, including Meta's Muse and Grok Bot. Hill says a typical transaction is about $100, that retail made up 36% of transactions and 32% of volume, and travel 28% of volume. Link gives an agent a separate card number rather than the user's real one, and users can set spending limits.