Stripe is making moves to dominate every layer of payments, from a potential PayPal acquisition to AI billing tools and stablecoin infrastructure.
Stripe processed $1.9T in volume, its new AI billing tool tracks LLM usage in real time, and its x402 integration lets AI agents send and receive stablecoin payments autonomously.
AI can decide, but consumers still hesitate to hand it their card details. Agentic commerce is still emerging, but the trust gap is already shaping how pilots are built and how much payment autonomy AI is given.
We look at how these developments are unfolding and what they may foreshadow for the wider commerce ecosystem.
PayPal is building infrastructure to connect merchants to AI shopping platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini through a single integration, positioning itself as the layer between commerce and conversational AI.
The company argues this could level the playing field for small merchants by shifting discovery from ad-driven search to AI recommendations based on product fit.
