Developing an open standard for agentic commerce (stripe.com)

Stripe and OpenAI announced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT and released the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open-source (Apache 2.0) standard that enables AI agents to initiate and complete purchases on behalf of users. Live in the US for Etsy sellers and rolling out to millions of Shopify merchants, Instant Checkout lets users discover products in chat, pick a saved payment credential, and authorize an AI agent to start checkout — with the merchant retaining control as the merchant of record. ACP standardizes the end-to-end flow so businesses don’t need bespoke integrations for each agent: agents present products and collect consent, then send a secure, permissioned tokenized payment credential to the merchant and payment provider; merchants evaluate fraud/risk signals and accept or decline the charge. The spec supports physical/digital goods, subscriptions, asynchronous buys, multi-merchant carts, and custom checkout behaviors while integrating with existing backends and payment stacks. For the AI/ML community this reduces fragmentation, clarifies threat surfaces (bot fraud and credential handling), and enables richer, programmatic commerce use cases while preserving business control and auditability. The spec and docs are available now at agenticcommerce.dev for implementers and agent builders.