Meta and Sierra develop Personal Agent Protocol for AI agents

Meta and Sierra are developing Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard designed to govern how personal AI agents interact with businesses on behalf of consumers.

The initiative includes industry partners Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart, with the aim of establishing a consistent approach to authentication, permissions, and business oversight when AI agents perform tasks for users.

The protocol is built on the principle that consumers decide what access to give their personal agents, while companies set parameters for what those agents can do. A session starts on the company's website, where the agent discovers what the company offers and how to reach it; the agent can begin as a guest, which may be enough to check product availability or ask about a returns policy.

For tasks that require account access, the customer can sign in on the company's page or use credentials already set up with the agent, and choose whether the agent has read-only or write access. Sessions are built on OAuth and carry across channels, so a question asked before sign-in and an order change made afterward form part of the same visit.

Companies choose the route through which agents complete tasks: their regular web pages, APIs built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI, or their own agent for tasks that need conversation, such as a warranty claim.

Kevin Miller, Head of Payments at Stripe, said a customer relationship does not start or end at checkout, and that customers sending an agent expect the same service they would receive themselves; the protocol, he said, gives businesses a standard way to recognize and interact with their customers' agents. Mani Fazeli, VP Product at Shopify, noted the protocol can help agents and merchants work together across product questions, purchases, returns, and exchanges.

According to the disclosed roadmap, the partners plan to publish the v0.1 specification and extend it with payments-related features. For the fast-growing world of agentic commerce, the protocol tries to balance getting tasks done directly with giving businesses visibility and control, and its adoption will depend on whether the specification is genuinely open and practical to implement.