Stripe's Link wallet for agents lets a person's AI agent pay with the cards already saved in their Link wallet. The agent requests a spend, the person approves it in the Link app, and the agent receives a one-time-use card or shared payment token. It is a clean answer for one person and one personal agent. If that is not your situation, here are the alternatives, with Authoryze first because it is ours, and a note on when Link itself is the better pick.
What Link for agents does and where it stops
Link ships as a CLI and skill files that an agent installs in its runtime. Stripe's README for the CLI says the person approves every purchase, within 10 minutes of the request, and the credential is valid for 12 hours. The caps are $500 per spend request, $500 per day, and $20,000 per 30 days, with higher limits through Stripe sales. It is available to US Link accounts only. Granular controls for when an agent can spend without approval are listed on link.com as coming soon, not shipped. All of that was checked against Stripe's docs on September 16, 2026.
Those are reasonable defaults for a consumer. They are limiting for anyone running more than one agent, anyone who wants rules instead of taps, anyone outside the US, or anyone whose agent is hosted and cannot shell out to a CLI.
Authoryze
Authoryze is an MCP server with a rules engine in front of a single-use virtual card. The agent calls request_purchase, the server evaluates per-transaction limits, daily, weekly, and monthly caps, a total budget, merchant allowlists, and account-wide aggregate caps across every agent, then either denies, approves, or routes the request to you. In-policy requests under your auto-approve threshold go through with no tap. Approved requests get a single-use card through retrieve_card, issued via Basis Theory on Visa Intelligent Commerce or Mastercard Agent Pay, with Privacy.com as an alternate rail.
Claude and ChatGPT connect over OAuth. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and custom agents connect over OAuth or an API key. There is no CLI to install inside the agent and no skill file to keep current. Pricing is 1.5% per transaction with a $0.50 minimum and no subscription. Team-scoped approval routing and platform embedding are in development, not shipped yet. The full head-to-head is at Authoryze vs Stripe Link for agents, and how to set spending limits for an AI agent covers the rules in detail.
Where Link is better than Authoryze is for a consumer who already has a Link wallet, wants to reuse the cards and bank accounts in it, and values Stripe's purchase protections and reach. Authoryze asks you to enroll a card and set rules, which is more setup than tapping approve.
Crossmint
Crossmint launched an Agentic Cards API in June 2026 that lets agents pay with credentials derived from an existing Visa card, issued through Basis Theory over Visa Intelligent Commerce, with Mastercard and American Express support announced as in progress. It offers spending limits, merchant whitelisting, and approval thresholds, and its lobster.cash tool installs into Claude Code, OpenClaw, and other agent platforms. Card pricing is quote-only through sales.
Crossmint is the right pick if you also need stablecoin wallets, x402, or multi-chain payments, because those are the bulk of its platform. If an agent buying at merchants on a card is the whole job, it is more surface area than you need. See Authoryze vs Crossmint.
Nekuda
Nekuda's public product today is WebMCP, an open standard it co-developed that lets merchant websites expose actions to agents, along with a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that adds those tools to a site. Its earlier payments SDK, a wallet that stores and injects a user's card at checkout plus signed mandates recording authorization, is still documented at docs.nekuda.ai, but we could not confirm how actively it is offered alongside WebMCP. Treat that as unconfirmed.
Nekuda is worth a look if you are a merchant making your own site agent-ready, or a developer building checkout into your own app with an SDK. It is not a managed spend-control layer with a live approval gate. See Authoryze vs Nekuda.
Skyfire
Skyfire is identity-first. Its Know Your Agent protocol issues signed tokens that prove who an agent is and what it is authorized to spend, and its KYAPay network settles in USDC, which suits micropayments and agent-to-agent transactions that card rails handle badly. Wallets can be funded by card, ACH, or USDC. Skyfire runs an MCP server, and pricing is through sales.
Choose Skyfire if your agents are paying other agents or APIs in fractions of a cent, or if verified agent identity is the requirement. It is not built for a person reviewing and approving a merchant purchase. See Authoryze vs Skyfire.
Payman
Payman gives each agent an isolated wallet funded in USD over ACH or in USDC, with spending policies that cap what the agent can move and route anything over the policy to a human. It is aimed at B2B money movement, such as paying contractors, payroll, and vendor invoices to whitelisted payees. It does not issue cards. It is freemium with no published transaction fee.
If your agents send money to known payees rather than buying things at merchants, Payman is the better fit than Link or Authoryze. See Authoryze vs Payman.
How to choose
Pick Link if you are one person with one agent and a Link wallet, and you are fine approving every purchase. Pick Authoryze if you want server-side rules, more than one agent, aggregate caps, and an MCP connection that works with Claude and ChatGPT out of the box. Pick Crossmint if you need crypto rails alongside cards. Pick Skyfire for agent identity and micropayments. Pick Payman for payouts. The comparison index has every head-to-head page, and what to look for in AI agent payment infrastructure lists the questions to ask any of them.
Common questions
Is Stripe Link for agents the same as Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol?
No. The Agentic Commerce Protocol is merchant-side. It lets a business accept a purchase from an agent inside ChatGPT or Copilot. Link for agents is buyer-side. It lets a person's agent pay from that person's wallet. We compare the merchant-side product separately in Authoryze vs Stripe Agentic Commerce.
Can I let a Link agent spend without approving each purchase?
Not as of September 2026. Stripe's docs require approval of every spend request, and link.com lists controls for spending without approval as coming soon. Authoryze supports this today through an auto-approve threshold and optional spending envelopes.
Which alternative works with Claude and ChatGPT without a CLI?
Authoryze connects to both over OAuth as a custom connector or MCP server. Crossmint and Skyfire have MCP servers, and Crossmint names Claude Code among its supported platforms. We did not find a first-party ChatGPT connector documented for the others, so treat that as unconfirmed rather than absent.
Does any of these avoid giving the agent a card number?
No. Every card-based option here, including Link and Authoryze, returns some card credential to the agent so it can check out. The difference is whether that credential is single-use and scoped to one amount, and whether your real card stays out of the agent's reach. Virtual cards for AI agents explains what that scoping buys you.
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