Meta, Walmart and Stripe team up on rules for AI agents that shop for you

Meta, Walmart, Stripe, Shopify and a handful of other companies are writing the rulebook for AI agents that spend your money.

The group announced Monday the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard defining how personal AI agents authenticate with businesses and what those businesses let them do. The effort is led by Bret Taylor, the cofounder of enterprise AI startup Sierra who also chairs OpenAI. Built on the OAuth standard that already powers "sign in with Google" buttons, the protocol lets companies verify that a bot is acting for a real customer, lets shoppers choose how much account access their agents get, and lets businesses decide what those agents can do. A first draft of the specification is due later this month.

The timing is no accident. Meta's personal AI agent Muse became a viral hit after its September launch, topping Apple's US App Store on September 18 and holding the spot ahead of ChatGPT. Amazon responded by blocking Muse from its platform in September, citing scraping concerns, and it has also blocked Perplexity's agent and sued that startup. "Companies will know when it's a personal agent versus an actual person," Taylor told CNBC. "For a lot of companies there's a risk: you don't want just a random bot that isn't acting on behalf of a person to have access to this service. It is kind of chaos until such a standard exists."

Meta's David Singleton, who runs engineering for the company's Superintelligence Labs, compared the effort to email: a standard everyone can use to talk to each other. Notably absent from the founding coalition are Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic. A rival standard already exists: Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, launched in June, lets agents buy from about 175 million merchants, and both Stripe and Shopify have signed on to that one too.

This is the unglamorous plumbing phase of the AI agent economy, the moment the industry starts writing rules for bots that spend real money. Whoever writes the standard gets a say in how the next era of commerce works.