Stripe Releases SDK Enabling Payment and Billing Capabilities for AI Agents

Stripe has introduced a new software development kit (SDK) to integrate its financial technology seamlessly into AI-driven workflows. With the Stripe agent toolkit, bots will be able to engage in monetary transactions, helping to earn and spend funds, provide troubleshooting, and provide bills for usage with metered billing.

The new SDK supports AI agents built using Vercel’s AI SDK, LangChain, and CrewAI frameworks, as well as any large language model with function calling. It’s built on top of Stripe’s Python and Node SDKs.

Stripe warns the agent toolkit is “an early exploration” of the company’s journey into agentic workflows and recommends developers use the SDK in test mode and also restricted API keys.

Here’s an example of how Stripe’s agent toolkit might work with financial services:

Imagine a travel agent that can book flights for your company. Using LLMs and function calling we can assemble a set of agents that can search for flights online, return options, and ultimately identify a booking URL. With Stripe, you can embed financial services and enable the automation of the purchase flow as well.

It makes sense to have the bot complete the transaction for you—why force users to tackle the last mile? Using Stripe Issuing, a virtual and physical card issuing service, the agent could generate a single-use virtual card for business purchases. You can dictate which transactions to approve programmatically and specify budgets and spending limits.

When it comes to metered billing or usage-based billing, Stripe’s agent toolkit will be the middleware tracking prompts and completion token counts, while also issuing bills to customers.

Again, the company urges developers exercise caution initially. It says the toolkit was deliberately designed to be limited in scope and it doesn’t include access to the full Stripe API. However, richer configuration options will be added later. Stripe’s rationale is that with the growing number of available tools, “the likelihood of selecting the right set of tools decreases.” In addition, having reduced API access minimizes the risk of the agent making mistakes and avoiding mid-task failure.

You can access the Stripe Agent Toolkit on GitHub.

Featured Image: Stripe's logo hanging on the wall of the company's San Francisco offices, taken on Oct. 17, 2016. Photo credit: Ken Yeung