AI in Business
Personal Agent Protocol (PAP) in plain English.
Also known as: PAP,agent authentication standard,Trusted Agent Protocol
The one-sentence version
A proposed open standard for how a person's AI agent identifies itself to a business, signs in, and is granted read or write access on the customer's behalf.
The Personal Agent Protocol, announced by Sierra and Meta on October 6, 2026 with Walmart, Shopify, Stripe, Rocket, Genesys, and Instinct as partners, is an attempt to give personal agents a common way to deal with businesses. Sessions are built on OAuth: an agent can start as a guest to check stock or a returns policy, and once the customer signs in they decide whether it gets read-only or write access. Businesses get to see what personal agents are doing; customers keep control. Payments are not in the first version and are listed as a future extension. A v0.1 specification was promised for later in October, followed by workshops and a reference implementation. It competes with Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, which Stripe and Shopify have also joined, and sits beside Mastercard's Agent Pay on the payments side. Why it matters: as always-on agents (Dots, Muse, Grok Bot) start calling businesses, every company needs to decide whether to treat them as bots to block or customers to serve, and a shared protocol is how the second option becomes practical.