Meta Teams With Walmart, Stripe and Sierra on Standard for AI Agent Commerce

Bret Taylor, the Sierra co-founder and former co-chief executive of Salesforce Inc., introduced the protocol. "We're designing it to handle authentication, empower consumers and give companies visibility into what personal agents do through their websites, APIs or company agents," Taylor wrote in a blog post. "It's open for anyone to implement." Taylor, who is also chairman of OpenAI Group PBC, told CNBC he expects OpenAI to back the standard in the future and said there "will be chaos until such a standard exists" that gives retailers visibility into what personal agents do on their sites.

David Singleton, Meta Superintelligence Labs' vice president of engineering and consumer products, described the effort in an interview with CNBC as shared infrastructure. "We're defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future," he said. "If you think about email, it works great because it is a standard that everyone can use to talk to each other, and we think this is going to be quite similar." Singleton said Meta hopes the standard will make commerce agents easier for consumers to adopt, trust and use.

The partners presented the protocol as a response to a call from six major banks, including Bank of America and Capital One, for clearer rules around AI agents. Last month the banks published a paper urging the AI industry to establish standards, policies and consumer protections built on five principles: transparency, safety, privacy and data, choice, and interoperability. The banks said they feared broader agent adoption could increase financial scams, fraud and disputes, and warned that agents might favor certain products or payment methods because of incentives such as higher commissions rather than what best serves users.

Meta's own consumer agent, Muse, launched last month and has become one of the most downloaded applications in Apple Inc.'s App Store. It has also drawn scrutiny. SiliconANGLE reported that 404 Media said Meta engineers raced to fix multiple security vulnerabilities in Muse before its launch date, and researchers have raised privacy and security concerns about the agent. Amazon.com Inc. barred Muse from operating on its retail platform after saying the agent failed to identify itself, raising questions about how it would handle user account data and credentials. This week Wired reported that Muse was creating profiles of people in its users' lives even when those people do not use Muse themselves.

Meta has commercial reasons to push for adoption. A Citigroup report earlier this week estimated that Muse could generate more than $27 billion in revenue for the company by the end of the decade as Meta works to position it as the "front door" to online shopping, SiliconANGLE reported.

Editor's Summary

Meta Platforms, Walmart, Stripe and Sierra Technologies are jointly backing the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for authenticating AI shopping agents and giving businesses visibility into their activity. The effort follows a push by six major banks for industry standards and consumer protections around AI agents, and it comes as Meta's own agent, Muse, faces questions over security, self-identification and privacy.