SYSTEM Cited by 2 sources

Stripe PaymentIntents API

Stripe's PaymentIntents API is the standard mechanism for initiating a payment on Stripe. Stub page — covered here at the altitude of the 2026-03-12 agentic-commerce retrospective's machine-payment extension.

Machine-payment extension (2026-03-12 preview)

Per the 2026-03-12 Stripe retrospective, PaymentIntents has been extended with a machine-payment flow for agent-to-API per-request charging. The flow is:

1. Seller's service calls PaymentIntents with amount and currency.
2. Stripe generates a unique deposit address for the transaction.
3. Seller returns the deposit address to the calling agent (in an x402 flow, the protocol passes it back inside the 402 Payment Required response).
4. Agent pays programmatically — an HTTP-native stablecoin payment, no human checkout flow.
5. Funds settle into the seller's Stripe balance; status is tracked via API, webhooks, or the Stripe Dashboard.

Initial rail: USDC on Base. Stripe framed this as the opening deployment, with "more protocols coming."

Canonical use cases disclosed

• Per API call: inventory checks, pricing lookups, delivery quotes, pick-up-slot holds.
• Per task: fitment checks, bundle building, quote generation, replenishment orders.

Distinction from checkout PaymentIntents

Traditional PaymentIntents underpin human checkout — shipping, loyalty, confirmation. The machine-payment extension is for agent-to-agent / agent-to-API per-request payments during task execution, not at a human-identified buy moment. See concepts/machine-payment for the concept boundary.

Agent-provisioning extension (2026-04-30)

Per the 2026-04-30 Cloudflare + Stripe launch, PaymentIntents also underpins the payment-token channel used by Stripe Projects in the agent-provisioning protocol. When an agent provisions a paid service at an external provider (Cloudflare Registrar domain, Workers paid subscription, etc.), Stripe Projects issues a scoped payment token on top of PaymentIntents; the provider redeems the token for settlement. Three distinctions from the machine- payment flow:

• Longer-lived. Agent-provisioning tokens cover subscription periods, not single-request charges.
• Credit-card-backed, not stablecoin. Settlement runs on the user's stored card at Stripe.
• Capped. Default $100/month-per-provider ceiling is enforced at token-issue time.

The underlying principle — raw card data never touches the agent — is shared across both extensions.

Seen in

• sources/2026-03-12-stripe-10-things-we-learned-building-for-the-first-generation-of-agentic-commerce — machine-payment extension preview; x402 + USDC on Base rail; per-API-call / per-task use cases.
• sources/2026-04-30-cloudflare-agents-can-now-create-cloudflare-accounts-buy-domains-and-deploy — agent-provisioning payment-token extension; underpins Stripe Projects' scoped-token rail to external providers.

Related

• systems/x402-protocol — open HTTP 402 standard for Internet-native agent payments; Stripe plugs PaymentIntents in as the settlement backend.
• systems/stripe-projects — orchestrator that issues PaymentIntents-backed tokens for agent-provisioning.
• concepts/machine-payment — the agent-to-API per-request payment concept.
• concepts/payment-token-over-credit-card-sharing — shared principle across both extensions.
• concepts/agent-payment-budget-cap — scope + cap primitive for agent-provisioning tokens.
• patterns/machine-native-per-request-payment — the architectural pattern this API instantiates.
• patterns/agent-provisioning-protocol — the sibling protocol that uses the payment-token extension.
• companies/stripe — API vendor.