AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) — Agent Payments Protocol
What is AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol)?
AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) is an emerging open standard for letting an AI agent initiate and complete a payment on a user's behalf — such as an agent instructed to book a service or reorder a supply — with a cryptographically verifiable record of what the user actually authorized. It's designed to answer the trust question at the center of agentic commerce: proving an agent's payment request matches the human's real intent, not an unauthorized or hallucinated action.
More detail
AP2 defines a signed 'mandate' representing exactly what a user authorized an agent to spend and under what conditions, which a merchant or payment processor can verify independently of the agent itself.
Because an AI agent can act autonomously across many steps, a verifiable authorization record matters more than in traditional checkout flows, where a human directly clicks 'pay' at the final step.
Frequently asked
- Why is a new protocol needed for AI agent payments specifically?
- Traditional checkout assumes a human directly approves the final payment step; an autonomous agent acting across multiple steps needs a separate, verifiable record proving its payment request matches what the user actually authorized, which is what a protocol like AP2 provides.
- Does AP2 let an agent spend without any user authorization?
- No — the protocol's core purpose is the opposite: a signed mandate captures exactly what the user authorized in advance, and a merchant or processor can verify that mandate rather than simply trusting the agent's request at face value.
See also
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