AI Payment Shadow War: Google Teams Up with 60 Allies, Stripe Builds Its Own Path

AI Payment Undercover Battle: Google Leads 60 Allies, Stripe Builds Its Own Path

By Beating

The money has already moved into the code.

Half a year ago, AI payments were just PPT slides at product launches. Now, AI is becoming the “cash register.”

Open ChatGPT now, search for any product, and you’ll see a blue Buy button. Fill in your address, pay, and ship. All without redirects or opening any web pages.

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

But a more covert commercial war is quietly unfolding—the tolls of AI payments. The dispute over who gets the toll fees will start from the two major AI payment camps in fall 2025.

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

The list is full of old faces from traditional finance: Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, plus a few tech allies.

On September 29, Stripe partnered with OpenAI to release another protocol, the Agentic Commerce Protocol, or ACP. Stripe also announced it’s testing ACP-based agent commerce solutions with AI companies like Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic, and Perplexity—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 mundane 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 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 collect tolls on every transaction.

That’s the essence of this war.

A Roundtable Changing in 12 Months

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 bosses sat together, including two who had never met before: Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and a young man named Zach Abrams.

Abrams is no small player. He and partner Sean Yu are serial entrepreneurs. In 2013, they sold their first company, Evenly (a P2P transfer app similar to Venmo), to Square (now Block).

Later, Abrams became 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 include Coinbase and SpaceX.

The roundtable’s initial topic was broad, but Abrams recalls being shocked: over 90% of the conversation 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 meeting Abrams—not to discuss partnership, but to discuss acquisition.

In October 2024, Stripe announced it would acquire Bridge for $1.1 billion. Bridge had just raised $40 million in Series A 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—companies that realized their full potential after being acquired.

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

This was just the beginning.

Things moved quickly afterward. In May 2025, Stripe launched a stablecoin financial account, allowing 101 countries’ businesses to hold stablecoin balances and make payments globally using stablecoins.

In the 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 function is simple: enable any app to embed a digital wallet, allowing users to pay on-chain without downloading additional crypto wallet apps. 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, Stripe and crypto investment giant Paradigm co-founded Tempo Chain, a 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 can 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 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 the project at $5 billion. A blockchain project less than two months old, valued at $50 billion. Stripe and Paradigm did not participate in this round.

In December, Tempo opened public testing. 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—except its own chain, stablecoin, or wallet.

Alliances are the product of groups sitting down and meeting. 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 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 unresolved for years. Retail investors may not care, but in the AI world, tens of thousands of automated trades happen daily, each requiring verifiable audits. No serious company would base its AI trading on a stablecoin with questionable compliance.

Circle? A NYSE-listed company. The SEC has reviewed its ledger, quarterly financial disclosures show how much US Treasuries and cash reserves it holds, and the whole world can see.

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

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

While the two 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 does that mean? It’s roughly 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 transactions are 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 stablecoins.

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%. Four trillion dollars in bank deposits are essentially zero-interest.”

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

He’s pointing to a trend. And Circle is right in the middle of it.

Epilogue

Finally, let’s zoom out a bit.

This battle over AI payment standards appears to be a contest between two business camps. But behind it lies a deeper question: as AI begins to participate independently in economic activity, is our existing financial system still enough?

Patrick Collison envisions a future where AI agents are the main participants in the economy. They compare prices, procure, pay, and settle—all without human buttons. It’s the ultimate efficiency, but also the boundary of risk.

Google and traditional finance see another future: AI should be integrated into existing financial infrastructure, governed by current regulations, operating within trusted frameworks.

Two futures, two logics, two camps.

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

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

Until one day, when AI’s purchase goes wrong, and you realize no one—no AI—knows who to ask for a refund.

At that moment, everyone will suddenly remember the questions left unanswered today.

But by then, the pipeline will be fixed, and tolls will be collected.

That’s how history always goes: get on first, buy your ticket later.

This time, though, the train is moving too fast.