Personal AI assistants are moving from answering questions to doing things — checking whether an item is in stock, changing a delivery, booking an appointment. But every business website and app works differently, and there has been no agreed way for an agent to prove who it is acting for or what it is allowed to do. A new open standard backed by Meta and some of the biggest names in retail and payments is trying to fix that.
What is the Personal Agent Protocol?
The Personal Agent Protocol (PAP) was announced on October 6 by Sierra, the customer-service AI company led by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, with Meta as co-developer. It is an open standard, built on the widely used OAuth sign-in framework, that defines how a personal AI agent authenticates with a business and what it may do once connected.
Launch partners include Shopify, Stripe, Walmart, Genesys, Instinct and Rocket. On October 9, Sierra published a draft of the protocol and named 35 more design partners, including OpenAI, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Bank of America and Cloudflare.
How it would work
- Start as a guest: an agent can ask a business basic questions — stock levels, a returns policy — without logging in.
- Sign in with permission: when a task needs your account, you sign in and choose whether the agent gets read-only access (to check an order) or write access (to change it).
- One visit across channels: a question asked before login and an order change made after it count as the same session.
- Business control: each company decides how agents reach it — through its website, through its APIs (using standards such as MCP or OpenAPI), or by talking to the company’s own AI agent.
- Visibility: businesses can see what agents are doing on their sites.
Rocket, one of the launch partners, said Meta’s Muse assistant — launched about a month earlier, and able to pay with saved cards through Stripe’s Link — will be able to move across its platform from finding a home to arranging financing.
What’s not in it yet
The first version deliberately leaves out some of the hardest problems. Payments, push notifications and more detailed permissions are listed as future extensions. That matters: in many markets, including Europe, rules on strong customer authentication were written for a person approving a payment, not software approving one on their behalf.
There are also competing standards. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, which Microsoft and Worldpay have joined, focuses on agent payments — and Stripe and Shopify are backing both efforts, so it is not yet clear which approach will win out.
What it means for you
If widely adopted, PAP could make AI assistants far more useful for routine chores: tracking parcels, rebooking appointments or handling returns without you navigating a dozen websites. The design choices — explicit sign-in, read-only versus write access, visible activity — are meant to keep the user in control.
For now, the practical advice is the same as for any app: grant an agent the least access it needs, review what it has done, and be cautious about letting any software spend money on your behalf until payment safeguards are settled.