Building for agents that spend
Takeaways from LangChain Interrupt on wallets and financial infrastructure for agents
Madeleine Charity
|May 21, 2026
The Privy team attended LangChain’s premier AI agent conference Interrupt last week. Billed as “The Agent Conference”, one theme dominated: as enterprise agents move into production, teams are thinking hard about how to give those agents spending power.
Last year, the conversation centered on getting agents from prototype to production. This year, enterprises showed up with agents already running at scale. One speaker put it simply, "The shift is from a system that answers questions to one that does work alongside you."
During these conversations about production-ready agents, we kept thinking about the next step: what happens when the work agents do requires money and how do we equip them with the tools to handle transactions securely?
The ceiling on autonomy
Today, most agents hit a wall the moment a workflow requires a transaction. The workarounds are familiar: redirect the user to a traditional checkout flow, or rely on billing agreements negotiated by humans offline.
One team building a concierge agent told us their current plan is exactly that: redirect users to an existing checkout flow the moment a booking requires payment. That handoff breaks the autonomy the agent was built to provide.
We talked to teams building concierge agents, procurement agents, and research agents. The pattern was consistent: they all had "payments" somewhere on their roadmap, but no clear primitive to build on.
A two-sided problem
Agentic commerce requires infrastructure on both sides. Agents need wallets to spend, and merchants need new rails to accept.
On the acceptance side, Stripe is making it possible for any API or MCP server to become machine-payable, while protocols like MPP and x402 give merchants standardized ways to receive agent-initiated transactions.
On the spending side, agents need programmable wallets with built-in policy enforcement. Privy recently launched our Agent CLI to make it easy to provision and fund a wallet for an agent directly from the command line. Stripe also made an update to its consumer wallet, Link, where you can now integrate AI agents so that they can spend on your behalf securely.
Why this is a deep problem
Traditional payments often assume that a human is in the loop. Agentic commerce changes that.
Once software can autonomously make purchases, move funds, or pay for services, you need infrastructure built specifically for machine-driven transactions:
Wallets agents can access and use programmatically
Guardrails that define what an agent is allowed to spend, where, and under what conditions
Infrastructure that works across agent frameworks and models, whether teams build build on LangChain, AWS AgentCore, Anthropic, OpenAI, or other future agent stacks.
There are also entirely new authentication and permissioning decisions unique to agents. Should an agent inherit its user's permissions, or operate with its own scoped identity? Should credentials be passed directly to the agent, or mediated through a policy layer? Get them wrong, and you create serious security risks. Get them right, and agents can safely participate in real economic workflows.
We heard this repeatedly from agent platform teams: they're great at orchestration, context management, and tool execution, but they do not want to own the financial enforcement layer themselves. As one builder told us, "that's a deep security problem whole products are built around."
What Privy is building
We're building the spending primitive that plugs into any agent framework. Privy’s agentic infrastructure integrates directly into agent workflows, backed by the wallet infrastructure, key management, and security architecture we've spent years building.
The teams building agents today are solving orchestration, context, and evaluation. Spending is next on their roadmap. We're making sure the infrastructure is ready when they get there.
Agents that can reason and act will inevitably need to transact. The companies building that financial infrastructure now will shape how autonomous commerce operates over the next decade.
To get started with agentic wallets, read the Agent docs and start testing agentic wallets today.
