AI agents need to spend money — Stripe and iWallet are building the rails

Stripe and Tempo unveiled the Machine Payments Protocol to let AI agents make programmatic payments without human approval.

iWallet proposed an Autonomous Settlement Protocol to automatically settle multi-party transactions when verified real-world events occur.

Both efforts remove human touchpoints from payments, but they target different layers of the transaction stack.

If adopted, these protocols could become core infrastructure for autonomous commerce and agent-driven workflows.