AI Payment Undercover Battle: Google Teams Up with 60 Allies, Stripe Builds Its Own Path

When AI begins to independently participate in economic activities, is the financial system designed for humans still sufficient?

Article by: Lin Wanwan, Rhythm

Money has already lived in code.

Six months ago, AI payments were just a PowerPoint at a launch event. Now, AI is becoming the “cash register.”

Currently, when you open ChatGPT and search for any product, you’ll see a blue Buy button. Enter your address, pay, and ship. All without switching pages or opening any websites.

Last week, Google also jumped in, integrating Etsy and Wayfair products into Search and Gemini, allowing direct checkout within the conversation. Microsoft’s Copilot also launched shopping and checkout features simultaneously. Meta’s Zuckerberg just announced a full shift toward AI agent commerce.

But a more covert business story is quietly unfolding—the tollgate dispute of AI payments—starting from the fall of 2025 between two major AI payment camps.

On September 16, Google gathered over 60 companies to release the “AI Agent Payment Protocol.”

The list is full of traditional financial giants: Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, plus a few tech allies.

On September 29, Stripe partnered with OpenAI to release another protocol, the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP). Stripe also announced it’s testing AI-native proxy commerce solutions based on ACP with Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic, Perplexity, and other AI companies—all native AI players.

These two lists have minimal overlap. Coinbase appears in Google’s AP2 ecosystem and is also a long-term partner of Stripe.

What these camps are fighting over is a seemingly simple but trillion-dollar question: When AI spends money on behalf of humans, whose pipeline does the money flow through?

You might think this is far from you. But consider: you now ask ChatGPT to book flights, let AI assistants compare prices and buy things, and let agents automatically procure office supplies. These scenarios are visibly becoming reality. Every transaction requires a pipeline to move money from your pocket to the merchant.

Whoever controls this pipeline can charge a toll on every transaction.

That’s the essence of this war.

A Year of Changing the Roundtable

The story begins at a dinner.

In summer 2024, Stripe hosted a fintech roundtable at its San Francisco headquarters, inviting then-U.S. Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo.

A group of payment company executives sat together, including two who had never met before: Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and a young man named Zach Abrams.

Abrams had a notable background. He and partner Sean Yu are serial entrepreneurs. In 2013, they sold their first company, Evenly (a P2P transfer app similar to Venmo in the U.S.), to Square (now Block).

Later, Abrams became the head of consumer products at Coinbase and served as Chief Product Officer at Brex; Yu worked as an engineer at DoorDash and Airbnb. In 2022, they reformed as Bridge, helping enterprises integrate stablecoin payments. Clients included Coinbase and SpaceX.

The roundtable’s initial topic was broad, but Abrams later recalled being shocked: over 90% of the discussion was about stablecoins, even though he was the only stablecoin company present.

Before that, Bridge had been trying to become a Stripe client, aiming to integrate its tech into Stripe’s payment system. But after that roundtable, the direction changed. Collison began frequently inviting Abrams to meet—not to discuss partnership, but to discuss acquisition.

In October 2024, Stripe announced it would acquire Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge had just completed a $40 million Series A funding in March 2024, valuing it at $200 million.

The purchase price was 5.5 times the valuation, possibly over 100 times revenue multiples. Sequoia Capital, in a post-investment statement, said they believed Bridge would join the ranks of Instagram, YouTube, PayPal, and WhatsApp—becoming “a company that realizes its full potential after acquisition.”

In February 2025, the deal officially closed. Bridge’s 60-person team moved into Stripe’s San Francisco headquarters and attended Stripe’s biweekly new employee training.

This was just the beginning.

Things accelerated rapidly afterward. In May 2025, Stripe launched a stablecoin financial account, allowing businesses in 101 countries to hold stablecoin balances and make global payments using stablecoins.

That same month, ChatGPT introduced shopping recommendations, enabling users to search for products, compare options, and then jump to merchant sites to order.

In June, Stripe acquired wallet company Privy.

Privy’s core offering was simple: enabling any app to embed a digital wallet, allowing users to pay on-chain without downloading additional crypto wallet software. At that time, over 75 million accounts were using it.

Patrick Collison tweeted plainly: “Money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world’s best programmable vaults.”

In September, in partnership with crypto investment giant Paradigm, they incubated Tempo Chain—a brand-new blockchain designed specifically for payments. Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang (also a Stripe board member) led the team.

The list of companies joining Tempo’s design reads like an all-star lineup of the payments industry: OpenAI, Anthropic, Deutsche Bank, Visa, Shopify, Standard Chartered, Brazil’s largest digital bank Nubank, DoorDash, Revolut, South Korea’s e-commerce giant Coupang.

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison said Tempo could process tens of thousands of transactions per second, with sub-second confirmation, fees under 0.1 cents per transaction, and transaction costs denominated in USD stablecoins—no need to hold highly volatile native tokens.

That same month, Stripe and OpenAI officially released the ACP protocol, simultaneously launching ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout feature—users see recommended products in the chat and can order and pay with one click, without redirects or card entry.

The first support was Etsy merchants, followed by Shopify’s million merchants.

In October, Tempo completed a $500 million Series A funding round, led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, with Sequoia, Ribbit Capital, and SV Angel participating, valuing it at $5 billion. A blockchain project less than two months old, valued at $5 billion. Stripe and Paradigm did not participate in this round.

In December, Tempo opened public beta. UBS, Mastercard, and European buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna joined as partners.

Meanwhile, Zach Abrams announced that Bridge had applied for a national bank trust charter in the U.S. to comply with the stablecoin regulation law signed into effect in July 2025—the GENIUS Act.

Connecting these events: $1.1 billion for token issuance, stablecoin financial accounts, wallet acquisitions, blockchain incubation, bank licensing.

From issuing tokens to building chains, wallets, protocols, and obtaining licenses—Stripe is doing every layer itself.

By contrast, Google has over 60 alliance members, an open protocol, and a code repository. Google has everything but its own chain, stablecoin, or wallet.

Alliances are the product of group meetings. Stripe is building a system that can go live with a single decision-maker.

By the month Google launched AP2, Tempo was already testing.

No matter who wins, Circle is guaranteed to win.

There’s a player in this war smarter than Stripe.

It doesn’t take sides, doesn’t fight, and hardly speaks. But whoever wins, it’s guaranteed to win.

This player is called Circle.

Circle issued a stablecoin called USDC, currently the most compliant digital dollar globally.

Another company, Tether, issues USDT, which is larger in scale, but questions about its reserves and audits have gone on for years without resolution. Retail investors may not care, but in the AI world, tens of thousands of automated trades happen daily, each requiring verifiable audits. No reputable company dares to base its AI trading on a stablecoin with questionable compliance.

Circle? A NYSE-listed company. The SEC has reviewed its ledger, quarterly disclosures show reserves in U.S. Treasuries and cash, visible worldwide.

So, an interesting situation emerges: Stripe’s stablecoin accounts support USDC. OpenAI uses USDC via Stripe. Coinbase in Google’s camp also handles USDC.

Two camps fight fiercely over the “entry point”—who controls the interface and protocol for AI spending. But regardless of who holds the entry, the money ultimately needs to be converted into stablecoins on-chain. In the compliant stablecoin market, USDC has almost no competitors.

While the camps fight over the entry point, Circle handles the settlement volume.

Here’s some data: in 2024, global stablecoin transfers totaled $15.6 trillion. What’s that? About the same as Visa’s total annual transaction volume.

A technology less than ten years old has already matched Visa’s network built over sixty years.

And AI trading is just beginning. Consulting firm Edgar Dunn & Co. predicts that by 2030, AI-driven transactions will reach $1.7 trillion. Each of those transactions will likely go through the stablecoin pipeline.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly stated at a Senate hearing in June 2025 that a stablecoin market cap of $2 trillion is a “very reasonable expectation.”

Patrick Collison also said: “The average interest rate on U.S. bank deposits is only 0.40%. $4 trillion in bank deposits is essentially zero interest.”

He sees this as a “loser strategy,” and believes young people will eventually shift their money into higher-yield stablecoins.

He’s talking about a trend. And Circle is right in the middle of it.

Epilogue

Finally, let’s zoom out a bit.

This standard war over AI payments appears to be a battle for territory between two business camps. But behind it reflects a deeper question: when AI begins to independently participate in economic activities, is the financial system designed for humans still enough?

Patrick Collison envisions a future where AI agents are the main participants in economic activity. They compare prices, procure, pay, settle—all without human pressing any button. This is the ultimate efficiency but also the boundary of risk.

Google’s alliance with traditional finance sees another future: AI should be integrated into existing financial infrastructure, constrained by current regulations, operating within established trust frameworks.

Two futures, two logics, two camps.

But one thing is certain: when AI needs to spend money, the money must run on-chain, and settlement requires stablecoins.

So Circle continues to win. Stripe and Google keep fighting. Regulators keep chasing. Merchants keep onboarding. Consumers remain unaware of which pipeline their money flows through.

Until one day, when AI’s purchase goes wrong and you realize no one, not even AI, knows who to ask for a refund.

On that day, everyone will suddenly remember the questions left unanswered today.

But by then, the pipeline will be fixed, and tolls will have already started.

History always goes like this: get on the train first, buy your ticket later.

This time, the train is moving too fast.