What does this actually have to do with agents? What does the protocol include that makes this useful with AI rather than just a boring old program?
Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
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Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
#12MPP handles 'how do agents pay', but not 'did anyone authorize this'. For low-value API calls that's fine. But once agents start chaining transactions, you need a channel where the agent can ask a human 'I'm about to spend $2k on this, still in scope?' before the payment happens - not a fraud alert after. The authorization layer is a separate infrastructure problem from the payment protocol.
Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
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Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
#14What does this actually have to do with agents? What does the protocol include that makes this useful with AI rather than just a boring old program?
And would it not be useful to have some kind of human in the middle? For example what is to stop charge backs if no human has actually authorized the transaction?
Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
#15It seems like this is designed for atomic purchases, could it be extended for subscriptions?
> MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, *recurring payments*, and more.
https://docs.stripe.com/payments/machine/mpp
Yeah I read that copy too, did you read the spec?
Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
#16This is a good standard that I can get behind [0] since it's a serious proposal and submitted to the IETF [1] for MPP for machine-to-machine payments.
A well thought out proposal for the long term, unlike MCP which is a complete joke of a "standard" and broken by design.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment...
Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
#17Jokes about wallet-draining aside, we're already giving our agents a real cash budget that they use for tokens. Our harnesses have mechanisms to manage that spend. And having an easily detectable protocol would allow the harness to ensure that its deterministic code is in play to make these payments - you'd give your payment details to the harness, not to the agent itself.
And as to use cases, if I want quality outputs for automated research and discovery of a topic, in a world where quality journalism/scholarship should be compensated and does use tools like Cloudflare to block automated access, and where AI-generated content is everywhere, it's optimal for me to want to spend some amount of the money I spend on tokens, on the ability for my agent to access reputable primary and secondary sources as needed.
The challenge, of course, is that now there's an incentive for a spam source to try to get my agent to pay it, rather than the actual creator of the content. But there are interesting ways to solve this, because with these payment rails there's now an incentive for alliances of content creators to maintain indices of reputable sources and their canonical domains - perhaps even authoritative hashes of content. Lots of possibilities here.
Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
#18What does this actually have to do with agents? What does the protocol include that makes this useful with AI rather than just a boring old program?
There's a slightly new topic called Agentic Commerce, where you say for example: "purchase for me the most energy efficient dishwasher with a budget of $600", and the agent will connect via specialized via special MCP Servers and APIs to available stores, and will do the full purchase process for you.
This MPP helps bridge the gap between the agent putting the product "in the basket", to actually completing the full purchase process.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way advocating for this use case, but it's part of my job to understand how it works. Part of what I do is try to help Agents understand, for example, what is "an efficient dishwasher" using actual data, and not hallucinated info.
Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
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Re: Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
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