Agentic payment protocols

Technical standards that let artificial intelligence (AI) agents pay on a person's behalf, by setting how an agent proves which agent it is, shows what the person allowed it to buy, and hands payment details to a merchant.

When a shopping agent checks out, the protocol decides what it sends, such as a signed record of the person's instructions and a single-use payment token, and how the store checks it.

Overlapping specifications, mostly launched since 2025 by technology companies and card networks, that cover different layers of an agent-led purchase: identifying the agent, recording the person's intent, exchanging checkout data, and carrying a payment credential. Several are designed to work together, and none is the only standard.

Widely cited examples include:

• Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol Google announced in September 2025 with more than 60 partners. It records the person's instructions and the approved cart as signed mandates. In April 2026 Google donated AP2 to the FIDO Alliance, the industry body behind passkeys, where its Payments Technical Working Group is developing the protocol into specifications for agent-initiated commerce. Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), announced with Shopify in January 2026, covers the wider shopping journey.
• Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard from OpenAI and Stripe, released in September 2025 for checkout inside ChatGPT. It passes a payment token scoped to one merchant and cart total. In March 2026 OpenAI moved checkout into merchant apps, keeping ACP as the underlying infrastructure.
• Visa Intelligent Commerce, a Visa program announced in April 2025 that gives agent developers tokenized card credentials. Its Trusted Agent Protocol, released in October 2025, lets merchants verify signed requests from registered agents.
• Mastercard Agent Pay, a Mastercard program announced in April 2025 that registers agents and issues agent-specific payment tokens. In March 2026 it added Verifiable Intent, an open specification codeveloped with Google.

EMVCo, which maintains global card payment specifications, is also building a framework for card-based agentic payments.

Agentic payment protocols sit next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Agent mandate is the permission itself, and protocols define how it is signed and checked.
• 3-D Secure authenticates a cardholder present at checkout, while agentic protocols handle purchases where the person may be absent.