Meta, Walmart, Stripe and other companies are publishing Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard meant to govern how personal AI agents interact with businesses, CNBC reported Tuesday.
Bret Taylor, OpenAI’s board chair and co-founder of enterprise AI startup Sierra, is leading the initiative. In a Sierra blog post, Taylor and Clay Bavor said Meta and Sierra are developing the standard with Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart, and that anyone can implement it.
“Companies will know when it’s a personal agent versus an actual person. For a lot of companies there’s a risk: you don’t want just a random bot that isn’t acting on behalf of a person to have access to this service,” Taylor told CNBC. “It is kind of chaos until such a standard exists.”
The principle, Sierra wrote, is that consumers decide what access to give their agents and companies set parameters for what those agents can do. A personal agent finds what a company offers on its website, then starts a session on its user’s behalf. When a task needs account access, the customer signs in on the company’s page or uses credentials already set up with the agent, and chooses read-only or write access. The session runs on OAuth. Each company decides what to open up: its regular web pages, APIs built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI, or its own agent for tasks such as a warranty claim.
Taylor compared the approach to signing in to websites with Google or Facebook credentials, CNBC reported. David Singleton, vice president of engineering and consumer products at Meta Superintelligence Labs and a former Stripe technology chief, said agents need customers’ credit card and personal information to work well, and the standard adds visibility and control. “We’re defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future,” Singleton said, comparing it to email.
The effort follows the early September launch of Meta’s Muse personal agent, which Singleton said already has millions of US users. Amazon is among the companies that have blocked Meta’s agents, citing worries about website scraping, according to CNBC.
Sierra’s announcement does not list OpenAI, Google, Amazon or Apple among the participants. Taylor told CNBC that OpenAI and Anthropic are not on board now, but he expects the AI giants to participate and indicated he would be “really disappointed” if competitors do not use it. “The whole point of this is to be an open standard,” he said.
Sierra said it plans to publish a v0.1 specification later in October. It also plans to hold design workshops with interested parties and publish a reference implementation for developers, but gave no date for the reference implementation. Later additions could include finer-grained permissions and payment extensions that let an agent buy something without sharing credit card information.