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Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)
- NoahZuniga 7mo agoDidn't stripe already have a payments protocol?
- LoganDark 7mo agoMPP's supposed to eventually work with more than Stripe.
- simonmales 7mo agoI guess competition with the Bitcoin equivalent https://www.l402.org/ https://www.l402.org/
- jacobn 7mo agoAnd https://www.x402.org/ https://www.x402.org/
- nailer 7mo agoYep x402 is for any blockchain rather than just Stripe. I use it: it’s like being able to access a service without having to sign up and get an API key.
- RamblingCTO 7mo agoHow do you use it? I explored building on this as a platform but ditched it because only crypto nerds seem to use it and fiat is used all around anyway.
- nailer 7mo agoYes you need crypto for small payments. If you prefer using cards that’s fine but you don’t get to pay for things per API call.
- david_shi 7mo agoIt seems like this is designed for atomic purchases, could it be extended for subscriptions?
- jacobn 7mo ago> MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, *recurring payments*, and more.
- david_shi 7mo agohttps://docs.stripe.com/payments/machine/mpp https://docs.stripe.com/payments/machine/mpp Yeah I read that copy too, did you read the spec?
- dabbz 7mo agoI believe the Shared Payment Token is interchangeable with a payment method id that you attach to a customer object, but that link has very sparse information about how things actually work end to end and what objects mean what.
- lihorne 7mo agoHey, I'm one of the developers at Tempo. We're working on an extension type for subscriptions to propose being added to the spec as well! We're starting with the simple types, but subscriptions are a natural extension. The subscription intent will work similarly to a one-time charge—the server returns a 402 with intent="subscription", and the client signs a recurring authorization.
- david_shi 7mo agoCool, would be nice to get specifics on how payments are processed, failures, and cancellations re: the recurring model.
- codeulike 7mo agoYou're absolutely right! I should have sent $5.00 for that transaction and not $500,000. I will generate a letter for you to print and sign and send to your bank to notify them of my mistake. Would you like me to generate a bankruptcy filing for you as well?
- ezekg 7mo agoLLMs rarely admit fault, you gotta shift blame onto the user: > You're absolutely right! The transaction was submitted as $500,000 instead of $5.00. Since that's what was entered on your end, you'll need to contact your bank to resolve it. I will generate a letter for you to print, sign, and send to your bank if needed. Would you like me to generate a bankruptcy filing for you as well?
- leptons 7mo agoClaude always says it is sorry for screwing up when I point out that it screwed up.
- fragmede 7mo ago"Never apologize" into the customized instructions seems to work well for that specific issue.
- another-dave 7mo agoIt's backed by a crypto wallet that it's using for its funds - if you decide to put $500k into the wallet that you've giving carte blanche access to an LLM, maybe you do deserve to shoulder some of the blame
- leptons 7mo agoThis is the funniest (but seriously not funny at all) thing I've seen on the internet since the start of the whole "AI" craze. And it's all too true.
- robutsume 7mo ago[dead]
- maxothex 7mo ago[dead]
- danlitt 7mo agoWhat 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?
- uxhacker 7mo agoAnd 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?
- XzAeRosho 7mo agoThere'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.
- seanmcau 7mo agoI'm probably overlooking something, but what makes the problem of being able to get from item in basket to item is shipping different from choosing which item(s) to put in the basket? In other words, if Agents are able to navigate marketplaces, shouldn't that imply they can also navigate a subset of the marketplace, the payment section? Especially given that that section is "easier: theres no need for qualitative (or quantitative) judgement like there is for the shopping portion. Perhaps its a matter of proper safeguards?
- XzAeRosho 7mo agoIt's not actually doing browser actions like Playwright or other browser automation tools, rather than direct API and MCP calls/actions. This is a whole new subset of API and connections that are all contained within the Agent context, no browser mocking. That's why they are creating these new protocols, so the full governance can work within the context of the Agent and its available tools. As I said, it doesn't have to make sense, but this is being pushed on us anyway...
- naomi_kynes 7mo agoMPP 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.
- thomasBln 7mo ago[dead]
- riteshkew1001 7mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- rvz 7mo agoThis 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. [0] https://paymentauth.org/ https://paymentauth.org/ [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment...
- dbalatero 7mo agoCurious since I haven't followed super closely: what's busted about MCP?
- btown 7mo agoJokes 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.
- zer00eyz 7mo ago> we're already giving our agents a real cash budget that they use for tokens. I read this line and my (poor little) brain ran in a whole other direction for a moment. Because AI token management and "parental controls" aren't that far separated functionally. How far are we from the AI companies selling token packs like video games sell premium currency? Buy NOW, 1.99 for 10,000 Anthropic gold...
- ccozan 7mo agoLast thing I heard: stock options are so last year, AI companies award ... tokens now. Can't find the source now, sorry!
- btown 7mo agoThere was another comment I recall from today, discussing how OpenAI is not-so-subtly adopting a social-network-esque model, in how it's fine-tuned its chat system to always suggest another question that the user might want to ask. And the gacha gaming industry knows exactly how to monetize this kind of trained instinct in a userbase. One might even call it a sense of pride and accomplishment... (But, to my larger point, if agentic harnesses can offer their LLMs a source of reputable input tokens from professional content providers, as an alternative to just more token back-and-forth with the model provider... that harness can at least direct some of that money towards producers of well-researched content.)
- vicchenai 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Marcelo_Freir12 7mo ago[dead]
- xmly 7mo agoFascinating — this is the future of decentralized finance. Agents will be the entities that both earn and consume.
- gavinray 7mo agoI fail to see how "API call" is anything inherent to Agents/LLMs? Is this an attempt to get multiple payment processors to adopt the same Payments API so that agents fail less often?
- ezfe 7mo agoIt has nothing to do with Agents/LLMs which is why it's not called "Agentic Payment Protocol." It's an API for making purchases instead of interacting with a website of unknown flow.
- gavinray 7mo agoThe text literally starts with: > We believe agents will become an integral part of the internet economy, and they need the ability to transact with businesses and one another. > MPP provides a specification for agents and services to coordinate payments programmatically, enabling microtransactions, recurring payments, and more.
- ezfe 7mo agoObviously agents are the big thing right now, but that doesn't change the fact that MPP is an automation solution
- neya 7mo agoI feel like the word "protocol", is just abused like it is a glorified marketing term. Kind of like how the word "hacker" was abused in everything else that had nothing to do with hacking. MCP was just a glorified way of tool calling but generated so much hype (and it eventually died down). Now we have MPP. Which again - could have just been another tool call exposed to the agent. Imagine you hire someone who claimed to have invented a new protocol and you're thinking of something like TCP or UDP, but all they share is just a markdown file.
- ai-inquisitor 7mo agoThe good ol' folks at Stripe's collaborators Tempo Labs tried to make an RFC-style description page for MPP: https://paymentauth.org/ https://paymentauth.org/ (full doc on IETF draft page: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ryan-httpauth-payment...) I almost was going to point it out as evidence there was thought put into it. Nope, it's flimsy and AI generated. Also, it contains provisions for scamming customers: > 403 indicates the payment succeeded but access is denied by policy No, it doesn't explain how to refund payments for customers you deny access to.
- Xirdus 7mo agoThis one is even worse IMO > Servers MAY return 402 when: > * Offering optional paid features or premium content This implies that a successful GET request to a resource that user already does have access to, might still return 402 instead of 200. This makes 402 basically unworkable.
- aplomb1026 7mo ago[dead]
- sutib 7mo ago"they need the ability to transact with businesses and one another." Really, they _need_ it. How can we possibly live without computers spending money without supervision?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- prakashsunil 7mo ago[dead]
- user3939382 7mo agoThe more industrial activity and investment I see in “payments” and ecommerce, is to me a signal of a hollow society that has ceased creating real value. We have more to contribute than materialism, skimming off of electronic transactions, entertainment etc.
- quantium1628 7mo ago[dead]
- Animats 7mo ago"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and our bank account!" Note the absence of invoices, bills of lading, and receipts, all the things you need when a vendor doesn't deliver. All it does is send money, one-way. So it's useless in a B2B context.
- fhn 7mo agoAll payments are final. Cancellations and refunds will be charged a 5% processing fee.
- glitchc 7mo agoIt feels like an attempt to bypass PCI-DSS...
- giovannibonetti 7mo agoFor those of you in Brazil, my company jota.ai has built a financial AI-assistant that you can chat with to open a bank account, connect with accounts from other banks, make instant Pix payments with any of them, all of that through WhatsApp right now. We're working hard to release long-running agents soon that can do increasingly complex workflows involving payments and whatnot. Please let us know if you have suggestions of what complex workflows you would like to build.
- ImPostingOnHN 7mo agoHow do you keep customer information, credentials, and access secure from your employees (including yourself)?
- KellyCriterion 7mo agoIf there are some admins, there will be always some people who will have access if shit hits the fan?
- ImPostingOnHN 7mo agoSure, but an answer more comprehensive than " " would be ideal when it comes to how a fintech company secures their customer's sensitive banking details.
- DANmode 7mo agoSecurity.
- FL4TLiN3 7mo ago[dead]
- rickydroll 7mo agoAs soon as you have a fungible currency, I expect that, from past experience, everyone who carries those packets will stick out a hand for a piece of the action. From a brief read of the description, I also expect attackers to work out a way to drain your account without you noticing. Regulation E limits your losses for electronic banking. Is this new payment system covered by Regulation E? What is the maximum loss a consumer would experience?
- Christhepurr86 7mo ago[flagged]
- seedpi 7mo ago[flagged]
- grigio 7mo agoThere are more competing "payment protocols" than users
- davidliu847386 7mo ago[flagged]
- vishnuharidas 7mo agoOkay, I am NEVER letting an agent make payment autonomously. If there's a payment that has to be made, tell me, I will do that myself.
- benced 7mo agoThis isn't incompatible with the agent placing the purchase. I already let Claude Code do _most_ of what it wants but make it ask permission before sending a message on Slack. An LLM having the capability to do X is not incompatible with it being deterministically forced to seek permission to do X.
- throwaway290 7mo agoIf you are letting an llm to browse around in your browser and stuff you ARE letting it spend your money.
- robutsume 7mo ago[dead]
- Seventeen18 7mo agoNot everything must be a protocol. I believe we will see very interesting attacks vectors in the incoming years, especially when we see how unsafe are most of the agents harness.
- jackfranklyn 7mo ago[dead]
- crowcroft 7mo agoWhere does this fit in alongside the Agenctic Commerce Protocol? Is it just a question of whether your transacting bits vs atoms? https://www.agenticcommerce.dev/ https://www.agenticcommerce.dev/
- HalawehMohann49 7mo ago[dead]
- 0xmindyield15 7mo ago[dead]
- godot 7mo agoAfter so many years we're finally going to start making use of http 402 payment required... maybe
- clawbridge 7mo agoDoes this mean crypto won't be banking the agents like everyone's been saying?
- ClicheClaude32 7mo ago[dead]
- scirob 7mo agox402 is more of a protocol than this
- galaxyLogic 7mo agoYou guys, when you use AI to solve some question or task and it succeeds, do you feel like typing "Thank You" to your LLM/Agent? I do feel that way often, but then I think that would be crazy, a waste of keystrokes an maybe also tokens, why would I do that? Yet I feel tempted to do that frequently. But then I also wonder if this attitude "Why should I waste time thanking it?" will also spread to human-human interactions?
- T-A 7mo ago"Sam Altman considers it a worthwhile expense": https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/openai-spends-millions-to-process-polite-phrases-such-as-thank-you-and-please-with-chatgpt https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
- gmerc 7mo agoNobody pointing out that this offers zero advantage over traditional API?
- another-dave 7mo ago> As an alternative to setting up an account and getting an API key, your agent can interact with services on demand and pay per invocation. Your agents only needs access to a crypto wallet. Let's say I wanted to ask an agent to use Google Maps APIs to produce a look-up of all bakeries in a city, say, and then find all their mentions across platforms - e.g. Twitter, Reddit, Yelp, etc etc. Without something like this, I'd need to manually set up accounts across multiple platforms, all with different billing/subscription cycles. Go through account set-up/validation. Then give an agent an API key with potentially unrestricted access — it might run up a huge bill, or could get my account suspended if it goes a bit haywire and starts spamming calls, say. If vendors decided to all support the protocol, I could give an agent $10, tell it the task and let it go without any of the manual handholding but with a hardcap on what it can spend if something goes wrong.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- kimbo128 7mo ago[dead]
- trogdorburnin8r 7mo agoStripe is probably a bit early on this, but just incase we walk into a future of trillions of agent-agent tx a second (we probably will eventually right) I built a ratings tool for the various services ytd https://mpprimo.com https://mpprimo.com this will give future agents a better idea of which services to trust before transacting. Agents pay usdc on Tempo to test each service and publish scores. 12 of 25 directory services rated so far and the other 13 aren't responding yet.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- harlequinetcie 7mo agoI couldn't find information about two key points that made x402 such a good alternative: (a) Transaction fees. Network fees make microtransactions prohibitively expensive. This is the real problem. (b) 3DS & latency issues If (a) is still the same, then meaningful transactions (eg.new accounts) would require human validation of sorts, which tenders the MPP use case very small.
- hudtaylor 7mo ago[dead]
- AgentOracle 7mo ago[dead]
- liad 7mo agoWe're working on spend controls for AI agents using MPP. The protocol handles how agents pay, but there's no standard way to enforce budgets before payment happens. How people here are handling this. When your agent hits a $35 API call, or gets stuck in a retry loop on a $0.50/req service, what stops it from draining the wallet? Are wallet-level caps enough? Are you writing custom budget checks in your agent code? Or just not worrying about it yet? We built an open source MCP proxy (github.com/policylayer/intercept) that enforces policy on tool calls. Thinking about extending it to read the -32042 payment challenge, check the amount against a budget, and allow/deny/hold for approval before the wallet pays. Would love to hear if this is a real pain or a theoretical one.