Platform & products

Agentic Commerce Protocol

ACP

Definition

An open standard, licensed under Apache 2.0, for how AI agents, buyers and businesses complete purchases through APIs. Released by OpenAI and Stripe on September 29, 2025; Meta joined as a lead maintainer on April 24, 2026. It defines agentic checkout, cart and product feeds, delegated payment, delegated authentication, and order webhooks. The spec is labeled beta.

Defined in Stripe Agentic Commerce: The Agentic Commerce Protocol, the Agentic Commerce Suite and Shared Payment Tokens.

The full guide: ACP vs UCP vs AP2 vs MCP, explained.

How else it gets framed

The same term carries different emphasis depending on the surface it’s used on. Both readings are correct.

The open standard OpenAI co-developed with Stripe that powered Instant Checkout. It defines product feeds, checkout sessions and delegated payment tokens. Since March 24, 2026, OpenAI has extended it to product discovery, and it's licensed under Apache 2.0 for any business or AI platform to implement.

Instant Checkout Is Gone: How Buying Inside ChatGPT Works Now →

An open standard, developed by OpenAI and Stripe and licensed under Apache 2.0, for how AI agents and businesses exchange product data, checkout sessions and payment tokens. OpenAI says merchants start an ACP integration by sharing a product feed.

The OpenAI Product Feed Spec, Field by Field, With Shopify Mappings →

OpenAI's specification for sharing product feeds with ChatGPT and, for merchants with checkout enabled, running a checkout session in ChatGPT's interface while payment and order state stay on the merchant's systems. OpenAI's docs say OpenAI is not the merchant of record under ACP.

AI Shopping Channels: How Products Get Into ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity →

Where Agentic Commerce Protocol comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Agentic checkout: A checkout initiated or completed by an AI agent for a shopper, either inside the AI surface the shopper is using or on the merchant's site, using payment credentials the shopper has authorized. The merchant remains the seller and merchant of record; the agent handles the steps a person would otherwise click through.
Agentic Commerce Suite: Stripe's product for selling through AI agents, launched December 11, 2025. A seller shares a catalog feed with Stripe; Stripe syndicates products to connected agents, manages the checkout, processes the payment and sends the seller an order event. Each stage can be taken over by the seller. Stripe describes it as working across protocols, including ACP and Google's UCP.
Shared Payment Token: A Stripe payment credential an AI agent grants to a seller: a scoped, limited reference to the buyer's payment method, tied to the seller's Stripe profile with a maximum amount and an expiry. The seller charges it like a card and never sees the card number. OpenAI's docs call it the first implementation of OpenAI's Delegated Payment Spec.
Agentic e-commerce: Online selling in which AI agents, rather than people, carry out some of the shopping steps: searching catalogs, comparing products against a shopper's constraints, and in some channels completing checkout after the shopper confirms. Also called agentic commerce or agentic AI e-commerce.
Agentic commerce: Commerce transactions initiated, researched, or completed with an AI agent acting on the shopper's behalf, rather than a human clicking through a storefront unassisted.
Merchant of record: The business legally selling the product to the shopper: it takes the payment, owes the tax, issues refunds and handles chargebacks. In every agentic checkout we checked (ACP, UCP, Copilot Checkout, Perplexity's PayPal checkout), the AI company says the merchant keeps this role.

All 164 terms

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