What is agentic commerce?

Payments were built around a person at a checkout: someone types a card number, clicks a button and can be asked to confirm. An agent breaks each of those assumptions. It has no card of its own, it may run while nobody is watching, and a seller can't easily tell an authorised agent from an attacker. So agentic commerce is less about new ways to move money than about new ways to delegate: how a person grants an agent limited, provable permission to spend, and how a seller knows that permission is real.

1. Shopping on someone's behalf. An assistant buys from a merchant for a user. The Agentic Commerce Protocol, developed by Stripe and OpenAI, covers this: coordinating checkout and sharing payment credentials as secure tokens, with the business staying merchant of record.
2. Delegated card credentials. Card-based approaches give the agent a scoped credential rather than the card itself, such as a Stripe Shared Payment Token, which Stripe describes as a scoped grant with usage and expiration limits.
3. Mandates and verifiable intent. AP2, the Agent Payments Protocol that Google published, records what the user authorised as signed, verifiable credentials it calls mandates, available as an extension for A2A and the Universal Commerce Protocol.
4. Machine payments for APIs. For pay-per-call services, protocols such as x402 and MPP let a server answer with a payment request that the agent pays programmatically. Stripe supports both.
5. Policy-controlled wallets. An agent requests payments from a wallet the owner controls, through a service that enforces limits, recipients and approvals.

• It doesn't mean agents with unlimited access to your money. Every serious approach is about narrowing what the agent can do.
• It isn't one standard. ACP, AP2, x402 and MPP solve different parts of the problem and can coexist.
• It isn't only crypto. Card-based and stablecoin-based approaches are both in use.

• Agentic Commerce Protocol
• AP2: Agent Payments Protocol
• Stripe docs: Agentic commerce
• Stripe docs: Machine payments (MPP and x402)
• x402 specification and reference implementation (GitHub)

• Shared Payment Token (SPT)A Shared Payment Token (SPT) is a Stripe credential that grants an agent or seller scoped use of a customer's payment method, such as a card, with usage and expiration limits.
• HTTP 402 Payment Required402 Payment Required is an HTTP response status code that RFC 9110 lists as 'reserved for future use', meaning HTTP itself defines no standard behaviour for it.
• Stablecoin (USDC)A stablecoin is a blockchain token designed to keep a stable value relative to a reference asset, usually a currency such as the US dollar; USDC is a dollar stablecoin issued by Circle.

• ACP vs AP2 vs x402 vs MPP: agent payment protocols comparedWhat each agent payment protocol is for: checkout with merchants (ACP), verifiable user mandates (AP2), and pay-per-request machine payments (x402, MPP).
• What is the x402 protocol?x402 uses the HTTP 402 status code so a server can ask for payment and an agent can pay in the same request. How it works and what it needs.
• How to let an AI agent make paymentsGive an agent a payment tool, not a key: limits enforced outside the model, a human for larger amounts, and a record of every decision.
• How can an AI agent pay for an API?Prepaid keys, pay-per-call protocols like x402 and MPP, or paying a provider directly from a controlled wallet. Trade-offs, and what to limit in each.

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