Agents should probably just use credit cards (increase.com)

Agentic commerce — giving LLM-based agents the ability to make payments — is emerging as a major frontier, with proponents arguing for stablecoins and blockchain-native rails (see Coinbase and Stripe’s Tempo). Increase pushes a contrarian but practical view: agents will mostly use existing payment rails (cards, bank transfers) because they already provide consumer rewards, merchant preferences and, crucially, robust dispute protection (e.g., Visa chargebacks). For consumers, that means features like per-purchase virtual cards and user approval flows so agents can book travel or subscriptions while preserving benefits and liability protection. For businesses, agent-driven invoice validation and bill-pay will also likely settle over traditional rails where payee preferences and dispute workflows already live—Ramp’s agent-powered bill-pay is a live example. Looking forward, speculative use cases (Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl) suggest agents could autonomously buy premium content or data, where microtransaction cost and settlement cadence matter. Stablecoins could fit some low-dollar, market-clearing scenarios, but Increase expects many of these payments to be batched inside commercial relationships. The key technical implication: widespread adoption depends less on reinventing money and more on exposing programmable, low-level access to incumbent rails and building the dispute protections and UX that make agentic payments safe and scalable. Increase’s falsifiable hypothesis: agent-initiated payments will surge in two years, but the funding mix won’t change dramatically.