Authoryze and Link's wallet for agents solve the same narrow problem, letting an AI agent pay without ever holding your real card, and then diverge on who the product is for. Link is Stripe's consumer wallet, opened up so a person's agent can request a one-time-use card and the person approves each purchase in the Link app. Authoryze is a controls layer designed for teams and platforms running agents: an MCP server with per-agent spend rules, envelopes that let agents act within limits without a per-transaction tap, and an audit trail, with team-scoped approval routing in development. This page is about Link's agent wallet specifically. Stripe's merchant-side Agentic Commerce Protocol is covered in Authoryze vs Stripe Agentic Commerce.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Authoryze | Link's wallet for agents |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Teams and platforms running agents | Consumers letting a personal agent shop for them |
| Funding source | Your enrolled Visa or Mastercard, with a single-use credential issued via Basis Theory on the card networks' agentic rails | The cards and bank accounts already saved in the user's Link wallet |
| Credential the agent gets | Single-use virtual card, retrieved once via a time-limited link | One-time-use virtual card or Shared Payment Token, valid 12 hours |
| Approval model | Rules first: in-policy requests auto-approve, over-threshold requests route to a human | Every spend request needs the person's approval within 10 minutes |
| Agent-level spend rules | Per-transaction, daily/weekly/monthly caps, merchant allowlists, aggregate caps across agents | Stripe-set caps per integration (500 USD per request and per day, 20,000 USD per 30 days); user-set limits listed as coming soon |
| Acting without approval | Yes, inside rules and envelopes | Not yet, described as roadmap |
| Integration | MCP server; OAuth for Claude and ChatGPT, API key for headless agents | Link CLI and skill files; OAuth device grant for local agents, OAuth client for hosted agents |
| Stripe account required | No | No for payments, yes for financial insights |
| Team and platform controls | Team-scoped rules and approval routing in development; can be embedded as a platform default (in progress) | None; one Link account, one approver |
| Platform adoption | Independent | Meta's Muse (live), Grok Bot, Instinct, Browser Use, Claude Cowork, OpenClaw |
| Merchant reach | Anywhere that accepts Visa or Mastercard online | Anywhere that accepts cards online, plus instant checkout at 1M+ Link merchants |
| Pricing | 1.5% per transaction, 0.50 USD minimum, no subscription | Not published |
What Link's Wallet for Agents Is
Stripe announced Link's wallet for agents at Sessions on April 29, 2026. A user connects their Link account to an agent over OAuth. When the agent wants to buy something, it creates a spend request with the amount, merchant, and at least 100 characters of context explaining the purchase. Link pushes that to the person, who approves it on the Link website or in the app. Once approved, Link returns either a one-time-use virtual card for a normal web checkout or a Shared Payment Token for sellers that accept programmatic payments. The agent completes the purchase, the card is dead after one use, and the person's real card number never touches the agent.
The developer surface is the open-source Link CLI, distributed on npm, plus skill files that teach an agent how to drive it. A local agent authenticates with the OAuth device grant, so there is no browser callback or API token to manage. A hosted agent registers an OAuth client and redirects the user through Link's authorization endpoint. Stripe is explicit that no Stripe account is required for the payment capability. Test mode returns test cards without charging anything.
Two things make Link hard to compete with on its own terms. First, distribution: Stripe's September 2026 figure puts Link at more than 300 million users, and Link is accepted at more than 1 million businesses, where an agent can check out instantly with the saved payment method instead of a fresh card. Second, platform adoption: Meta integrated Link's wallet for agents into Muse, its personal AI agent, at launch on September 8, 2026, with the purchase approval rendered directly in the chat. Stripe also names Grok Bot, Instinct, and Browser Use as integrated agents, and lists Claude Cowork and OpenClaw as supported through the CLI. OpenAI and Microsoft ship Stripe-powered checkout in ChatGPT and Copilot, but those run on the Agentic Commerce Protocol, and we could not confirm either platform using Link's agent wallet specifically.
Controls Today vs Roadmap
At launch Stripe wrote that "each request requires the person's review before the credential is shared with your agent" and that it was "planning on expanding these controls to let people set spending limits, and choose when agents can act without additional approval." As of this writing, link.com still lists granular agent controls for spending with and without approval as coming soon, and Stripe's docs still describe per-request approval as the only path. Treat the roadmap as unconfirmed until it ships.
The limits that do exist today are set by Stripe per integration, not by the user: 500 USD per spend request, 500 USD per day, 20,000 USD per rolling 30 days, a 10-minute approval window, and 12-hour credential validity. Stripe will raise them through sales. There are no merchant allowlists, category rules, or per-agent budgets that the person configures, because there is exactly one approver, and that approver is the wallet owner tapping a notification.
Authoryze inverts this. Rules come first, evaluated server-side on every request: per-transaction limits, daily, weekly, and monthly caps per agent, merchant allowlists with subdomain matching, and account-wide aggregate caps so several agents cannot collude past a total. A request that passes every rule and sits under the agent's auto-approve threshold is approved without anyone tapping anything. A request that passes the rules but exceeds the threshold routes to a human. A rule violation is a hard denial. Spending envelopes extend this further: an amount the agent can draw against, one-time or recurring, without a per-purchase approval. The person is in the loop for exceptions, not for every transaction.
Consumer Wallet vs Controls Layer
Link is a consumer wallet that gained an agent interface. The unit of control is one person, one wallet, one approval per purchase. That is exactly right for someone letting Muse book a dinner reservation, and Link's purchase protections and Stripe's fraud tooling make it a safe default for that person.
Authoryze is built for the case where the agent is part of a product or an operation, not a personal errand runner. Three differences follow from that.
Any agent connects over MCP. Authoryze exposes request_purchase, check_status, retrieve_card, and get_spending_summary as MCP tools. Claude and ChatGPT connect over OAuth; Claude Code, Codex, and custom frameworks pass an agent API key as a bearer token. No CLI to install inside the agent's runtime, no skill file to keep in sync. Link's CLI approach works well for agents that can shell out, and less well for hosted agents that only speak tool calls.
Agents act within limits, not per approval. Each Authoryze agent gets its own API key and its own rules, so a procurement agent, a research agent, and a support agent can each run under different budgets and merchant lists, with a cross-agent cap over all of them. Envelopes let an agent draw down a pre-authorized amount without interrupting anyone. On Link, every one of those agents would be requesting one-off approval from the same wallet owner.
Designed for teams and platforms, not just one person. Team-scoped controls and approval routing to a named approver are in development, so that the person who set up the agent is not necessarily the person who has to approve its spend. Platform embedding is in progress: the goal is that a platform can make Authoryze the default payment path for the agents it hosts rather than asking each end user to bring a wallet. Neither is shipped yet, so weigh them as direction rather than a feature you can turn on today. Link has no team construct today either; its closest answer for businesses is a different product, covered below.
Link and Issuing for Agents
Link's wallet for agents is built on Stripe's Issuing primitives. Stripe positions the two as a pair: Link for consumers, Issuing for agents for businesses that want to build their own agent wallets and cards. Issuing for agents gives a business with a Stripe Issuing account per-agent virtual cards with per-card spend limits, merchant category controls, single-use lifecycle controls, and a real-time authorization webhook with a two-second window to approve or decline each transaction. Platforms can issue cards to the businesses or consumers on their platform through a contact-sales track.
For a team that wants agent spend controls, Issuing for agents is the closer Stripe comparison, and it is a serious toolkit if you are prepared to build the rules engine, the approval workflow, the authorization webhook, and the agent-facing interface yourself, and to hold a Stripe Issuing account. Authoryze is that layer already built, rail-agnostic, and reachable over MCP, issuing through Basis Theory on Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay, the same network rails Link uses, with Privacy.com available as an additional rail.
When Authoryze Is the Right Choice
Choose Link if you are a consumer who wants a personal agent to shop with the payment methods already in your wallet, you are fine approving each purchase, and you value Stripe's reach and purchase protections. Choose Authoryze if you are a developer, team, or platform running agents that need to act within defined limits without a human tapping every transaction: per-agent rules and envelopes, cross-agent aggregate caps, a full audit trail, and a single MCP server that any agent can connect to today, with team-scoped approval routing on the way.
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