One of the world’s biggest payment processors is enabling large language models to spend real money.
What’s new: Stripe announced Stripe Agent Toolkit, a library for Python and Typescript that supports agentic workflows that use API calls to execute monetary transactions. You can download it here.
How it works: An agentic purchasing workflow may look like this: A user asks the agent to find a flight to a certain destination, on a certain schedule, with a certain price limit; and an LLM queries a flight database, chooses a flight, obtains authorization from the user, and purchases the flight. Stripe Agent Toolkit supports agentic workflow frameworks from CrewAI, LangChain, and Vercel. It doesn’t yet implement all of Stripe’s API, but Stripe expects to extend it in the future.
- The library can issue virtual debit cards for one-time use, so applications based on LLMs can spend money only when you want them to.
- It also authorizes transactions in real time, so you can present intended purchases to an end user for approval before an agent executes them.
- It can track the LLM’s use of tokens per customer, so you can bill clients for costs they incur while using agents you’ve built.
- Stripe provides restricted API keys, so you can limit the range of API calls an LLM is allowed to request.
Why it matters: Agents that can spend money securely open a wide variety of applications. Stripe’s API previously made it possible to enable an LLM-based application to make purchases online, but doing so required trusting the LLM to generate the right API calls and not to make inappropriate ones. The new library makes it easier to enforce spending limits and API constraints, and thus to build agents that engage in ecommerce safely.
We’re thinking: Stripe’s offering helps developers build agents that are cents-ible!