Stripe’s John Collison on AI, Stablecoins, and the Return of Silicon Valley’s Tech Race

At Stripe Sessions, its annual product event in San Francisco, Stripe co-founder and president John Collison outlined an ambitious vision for harnessing artificial intelligence, stablecoins, and industry-wide regulatory changes — and for how these forces are launching Silicon Valley into “a good old-fashioned tech race.” In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC’s Kate Rooney, Collison shared insights into Stripe’s product roadmap, the role of AI in payments and fraud, the emergence of digital dollars, and how Stripe is bracing for an era of global uncertainty and platform upheaval.

AI Foundation Model: Stripe’s Bet on the Future of Digital Payments

The headline news from Stripe’s Sessions event: the launch of what Collison calls the first “AI foundation model for payments.” Inspired by how LLMs (large language models) have transformed understanding of language and context, Stripe is aggregating its AI efforts — historically deployed piecemeal in fraud prevention and conversion optimization — into a single, proprietary foundation model, trained on years of aggregated payment data.

“We trained a foundation model on all of the Stripe historical payment data,” Collison explains. This model is not an off-the-shelf integration with the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic, but Stripe’s own, leveraging open-source infrastructure but fully trained in-house. The targeted outcome: smarter fraud prevention, higher conversion rates, and the ability to make real-time, sophisticated inferences across massive transaction data sets.

Stripe had already reported an 80% reduction in card testing (a recurring type of payments fraud) over two years thanks to AI-powered models. Bringing all this together, Collison says, is “a constantly evolving adversarial game” — technology as beneficial to fraudsters as to law enforcement: “The automobile was very useful for police, but very useful also for bank robbers.” (Source: CNBC)

Yet AI is not only about defense. As Collison notes, the rapid rise of AI-powered businesses on Stripe’s platform is fueling “one of the fastest takeoffs” he’s ever seen — faster than previous waves like SaaS. Stripe’s AI infrastructure is, in effect, powering both sides of the commerce revolution.

Commerce Without Browsers: The “Agentic” Future and Stripe’s Toolkit

The next phase Collison envisions is commerce shifting away from web-based modalities toward integrated “agentic” buying. It’s not far-fetched: if consumers today ask AI assistants (like ChatGPT or Claude) for information, soon those same tools will transact on their behalf.

Stripe has built—and claims to be first in market with—a toolkit to enable “agentic buying.” With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, buying can now be conducted directly within the chat interface. While the first agent-driven transactions may feel unusual, Collison predicts they will quickly become the norm, just as San Franciscans have acclimated to self-driving cars. The industry buzzword, he says, is “MCP” (multi-channel platform commerce), as AI tools not only process information but interact with — and manipulate — the real world.

Stablecoins Move Center Stage — Quietly Powering Business Payouts

While headlines typically spotlight volatile crypto speculation, Collison is explicit: “There’s all the like speculation side of it… but stable coins are no fun to speculate on.” Yet their real-world utility is booming. Stripe’s recent partnership with Visa to offer a stablecoin-backed card and the cross-border payout feature — allowing funds to be held and transferred in “digital dollars” across 100 new countries, from Argentina to the Vatican — are at the heart of their real crypto push.

The numbers are compelling. The total value locked in stablecoins grew 40% over the past year, and Stripe has responded by acquiring Bridge, a stablecoin orchestration platform. Real businesses — AI startups, payroll platforms like Remote.com, cross-border transfer services like Chipper Cash and DolarApp — are building on these rails. Collison observes, “We’re really seeing this takeoff moment for stable coins where the supply… grew by 40% over the past year.”

Importantly, the end consumer may not even realize these are crypto-based transactions. Stripe is intent on “describing the functionality,” Collison says. “You can now pay people out in a whole bunch of new countries… We’re actually just mostly speaking about it as digital dollars. We’re not getting into the whole kind of crypto jargon.”

Stripe is watching major platform changes closely, with Apple’s recent move to allow third-party payment links within apps opening fresh opportunities.