Meta and Sierra propose an open Personal Agent Protocol for agentic commerce

Meta and the customer-service AI company Sierra proposed an open standard called the Personal Agent Protocol, intended to govern how a consumer’s AI agent authenticates and transacts with a business on their behalf. The companies said the protocol was backed by Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart.

The protocol builds on OAuth, the authorisation standard already widely used for third-party app access to accounts, letting a consumer grant their agent read-only or write access while retaining control over what it can do and giving a merchant visibility into agent activity across its websites, APIs and own agents. The pitch is to standardise a problem that agentic-commerce deployments have so far handled individually and inconsistently: how a business can tell that an incoming request is really acting on a specific person’s authority, and how much it should trust and permit that request to do. A Shopify product executive said the protocol would help “establish how agents and merchants can work together” to turn buyer intent into completed transactions.

As announced, the protocol was a proposal rather than a finished specification: Meta and Sierra said a version 0.1 spec, along with design workshops and a reference implementation, was planned for later in October 2026. Its value will depend on adoption beyond its initial backers — an authentication standard that only a handful of companies implement does little to solve the cross-platform trust problem it describes — and on whether rival efforts from other large platforms converge on it rather than competing with it.