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Personal Agent Protocol lands with no spec, a long partner list, and a login-first design

Sierra and Meta's open standard launched Oct 6 with Shopify, Stripe and Walmart on board. Payments are a future extension. The v0.1 text is due this month.

By Iris Holloway·Tools & frameworks·

Sierra and Meta announced the Personal Agent Protocol on October 6, an open standard for how a consumer’s AI agent authenticates with a business, built on OAuth, routed through MCP or OpenAPI, with payments explicitly deferred to a future extension. There’s no spec yet. The v0.1 text is due later this month.

The partner list carries the pitch while the document is drafted: Shopify, Stripe, Walmart, Genesys, Rocket, Instinct on Sierra’s version, with NiCE and Decagon added on Meta’s. Decagon published its own protocol, PACT, the same day, then said it would join PAP’s working group. Sixteen days before the announcement, Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse agent. That sequencing is the real design document. The first step in your customer’s buying journey is now a login handshake someone else is standardizing.

PAP joins a crowded shelf. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol shipped with Cloudflare in October 2025. OpenAI open-sourced its Agentic Commerce Protocol in September 2025. Google announced the Universal Commerce Protocol in January 2026 with Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart. Bret Taylor, who chairs OpenAI and co-founded Sierra, said he expects OpenAI and Anthropic to join. Amazon, meanwhile, is suing Perplexity, which has called the suit a “bully tactic.”

David Singleton, the former Stripe CTO now running engineering at Meta Superintelligence Labs, says Muse has millions of U.S. users. Yet PartnerCentric data, via the WSJ, puts the share of U.S. adults who trust an agent to complete a purchase at 3%, with roughly a third saying they’d never allow it. The gap between agent capacity and consumer consent is the entire market.

For small merchants, the practical read is narrow. TikTok has already wired an agent and one-click checkout into the For You feed; Shopify stores reach Muse through Stripe Link today. The protocols will converge or they won’t. Clean product metadata and a frictionless checkout decide which catalogs the agent sees first.

Sources