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

Current payment infrastructure was built for humans, not autonomous AI agents. Two new protocols are emerging to address this gap: Stripe and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), which enables AI agents to authorize and complete transactions programmatically using existing Stripe rails, and iWallet's Autonomous Settlement Protocol (ASP), designed for multi-party settlement in physical service industries like HVAC. MPP is live and handling discrete agent-to-service transactions; ASP is a forward-looking roadmap. Key unsolved challenges include machine-to-machine identity and trust, standardized settlement specifications across multiple parties, reliable AI-based physical verification, and unresolved regulatory questions around automated fund disbursement. The full stack for autonomous economic loops — transactional, settlement, and verification layers — is still years from being routine infrastructure.