Good morning & happy Thursday! Today, we're diving into Stripe Pay, perhaps the biggest enterprise payments announcement of the year, to see why Stripe is giving away the B2B transfers, and how that turns it into the payment network AI agents use to pay businesses (what Stripe Pay can and cannot do & the fine print behind 'free and instant,' why banks lose before Visa does, where Stripe's handles collide with Visa's plan for agent identity, how the launch ties into Stripe's lending push, & what to watch next + bonus deep dives into Why AI Agents Will Make Better Products Win [according to Stripe CEO], and The Agentic Transition Playbook inside), and unpacking AmEx's Q3 earnings to see why the 3,500 job cuts matter less than one line Stephen Squeri dropped about the middle market (how a one-time gain paid for the layoffs, why every company that moves its spend to Ramp costs Amex twice, how Ramp is going after corporate cash as well as card spend, & the Capital One move that would give Amex its first closed-loop rival in commercial + bonus deep dives into Ramp, a16z's State of Markets 2026: The AI Playbook for Founders and Investors, and How to Run The One-Person Company on Grok Bot inside) So let's jump straight into the interesting stuff ''...

Microsoft generated $10 billion in revenue from commercial arrangements with OpenAI, including revenue-sharing payments, in the quarter ended September 30, the company said in regulatory filing on Wednesday. That represents nearly 11% of Microsoft's total quarterly revenue of $92.3 billion, highlighting the enormous financial ties that remain between the two companies even as they increasingly compete for the same customers. Microsoft also reported $7.2 billion in outstanding receivables from OpenAI at the end of September, up from $6 billion at the end of June. That money represents amounts OpenAI owes for previous transactions, not additional revenue. It's not clear how much of Microsoft's revenue from OpenAI came from revenue-sharing payments or Azure cloud computing services. TechCrunch has reached out for more information. In November 2025, TechCrunch reported, citing leaked documents, that Microsoft had received $865.8 million in net revenue-sharing payments from OpenAI during the first nine months of that year....

AI is making familiar voices, faces, and documents easy to counterfeit, allowing fraudsters to exploit gaps between business functions even when individual systems remain secure. To identify these vulnerabilities, leaders should trace high-risk transactions from start to finish and ask what each receiving system assumes, what evidence it receives, and who independently verifies that evidence. Assigning clear responsibility for these handoffs, requiring verification through channels the requester cannot control, and giving designated employees authority to stop suspicious payments can help close the gaps....

In an email blast to customers titled 'Protecting your finances in the Al World,' Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, 'including an Al-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf.' You can practically sense the frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistants grow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks that someone's raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account. This latest warning comes as banks are still exploring how AI agents fit into the financial world but are reportedly grappling with unauthorized agents accessing their customers' money. As we discussed on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, banks, payment providers, and processors at still trying to figure out how to allow customers access to their bank accounts using AI tools, such as for agentic payments, which allow people to set agents to autonomously buy things at the best price or the right time....