Meta and Sierra on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, announced the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard meant to define how a consumer’s personal AI agent deals with a business: how it identifies itself, what the customer lets it see or change, and what the company lets it do. Sierra names Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart as partners; Meta’s own announcement lists Genesys, NiCE, Decagon, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart. Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor, who also chairs OpenAI, leads the effort. Sierra plans to publish a v0.1 specification later in October, host design workshops with interested companies, and release a reference implementation for developers.
In an interview with CNBC relayed by SiliconANGLE and Gizmodo, Taylor said there will be “chaos until such a standard exists.” David Singleton, Meta Superintelligence Labs’ vice president of engineering and consumer products and a former Stripe CTO, likened the effort to email: “We’re defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future.”
A guest first, then an OAuth session the customer controls
Under the principle Sierra described, consumers decide what access to give their personal agents, and companies set parameters for what those agents can do. The exchange starts on the company’s website, where the agent discovers what the business offers and opens a session on its user’s behalf. It can begin as a guest, which may be enough to check product availability or a returns policy. When a task needs the customer’s account, the customer signs in on the company’s page or uses credentials already set up with the agent, and decides whether the agent gets read-only or write access.
The session is built on OAuth, an established standard for authorizing access, and carries across channels, so a question asked before sign-in and an order change made afterward belong to the same visit. The company decides which routes to open:
- Its website: the agent navigates the company’s regular web pages.
- Its APIs: the agent connects through interfaces built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI.
- Its own agent: for tasks that need a conversation, such as a warranty claim.
Payments are left for a later extension
Payments are not part of the first specification. Sierra lists payments extensions among possible next steps, alongside more detailed permissions and push notifications, saying they “could let a personal agent complete a purchase without sharing credit card information.” Muse already buys things through a connector or directly on a business’s website, Meta said, and is designed to proceed only with the user’s explicit approval for sensitive actions such as signing in, completing a reservation, or making a purchase.
“A customer relationship doesn’t start or end at checkout,” said Kevin Miller, Stripe’s head of payments. “We’re contributing to the Personal Agent Protocol to give businesses a standard way to recognize their customers’ agents, efficiently interact with them, and shape their customer relationships.”
Stripe and Shopify also back Visa’s agent protocol
Stripe and Shopify now sit in two camps. According to The Next Web, both had already joined the Trusted Agent Protocol run by Visa , along with Microsoft and Worldpay. Visa’s protocol answers a different question: the agent proves, with a cryptographic signature bound to the merchant’s domain and to the operation, that it is a recognized agent acting with its user’s permission. Visa’s developer site says the product is still in development and deployment.
| Personal Agent Protocol | Visa Trusted Agent Protocol | |
|---|---|---|
| Led by | Meta and Sierra | Visa |
| Partners named | Genesys, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, Walmart, plus Instinct (per Sierra) or NiCE and Decagon (per Meta) | Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe, Worldpay (per The Next Web) |
| How the agent gets in | OAuth session; the customer grants read-only or write access | Cryptographic signature bound to the merchant’s domain and the operation |
| Payments | Possible future extension | Can pass Payment Account References for cards on file |
| Status | v0.1 specification due later in October 2026 | In development and deployment, per Visa |
Muse, Meta’s agent, and its payment partners
Meta’s stake runs through Muse, its personal agent, which launched on September 8 and has become one of the most downloaded apps in Apple’s App Store, SiliconANGLE reported. Muse pays with cards saved in Stripe’s Link, The Next Web reports, and PayPal said on September 22 that it was partnering with Meta to let its customers shop and check out through Muse at PayPal merchants worldwide, as Paypedia reported the next day. In September, Amazon locked Muse agents out of its store, saying their failure to identify themselves on Amazon.com raised concerns over the handling of customer credentials and account data, Gizmodo reported.
OpenAI is not part of the effort for now, though Taylor, its chairman, told CNBC he expects it to participate eventually. The Next Web noted that no European retailer, bank, or payment company has been named, and that a payment approved by software on someone’s behalf gets no carve-out from strong customer authentication.