What is the Agentic Commerce Protocol?

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe that enables AI agents to complete commercial transactions on behalf of users. It consists of three specifications: Product Feed, Agentic Checkout, and Delegated Payment.

Yes, the protocol specification is free and open source (Apache 2.0). Standard payment processing fees apply when using Stripe for payments.

Do merchants keep their customer relationships with ACP?

Yes, merchants remain the merchant of record and keep full control over customer relationships, including customer data, emails, and support.

How are payments secured in ACP?

ACP uses Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs) that are merchant-specific, amount-limited, time-limited, and single-use. The AI agent never sees actual payment credentials.

Which AI assistants support ACP?

ChatGPT supports ACP via its Instant Checkout feature. As an open standard, any AI platform can implement ACP support.

Why ACP Was Built

Agentic Commerce Protocol

September 29, 2025 — From Stripe’s product and engineering teams

Stripe: Becoming Agent Ready with ACP

Commerce has shifted in waves over the past few decades. Physical stores to ecommerce. One-size-fits-all catalogs to personalized recommendations. Desktop to mobile shopping.

Customers adapted each time — learning to search, trust online checkouts, and click “buy now.”

With AI, commerce is approaching another fundamental change.

The Traditional Commerce Problem

Two forces have been squeezing retailers for years:

Friction Has Changed

Ten years ago, customers would fill out long web forms without thinking twice. Today? Any form is friction. Every field is an opportunity for buyers to step out of the journey.

People’s tolerance for effort has plummeted. They’re used to one-click purchases, saved payment methods, and instant gratification. A traditional checkout flow that takes 10 minutes feels like an obstacle course.

Channel Fragmentation

Finding your audience has become harder each year. The same marketing spend gets spread thinner across an ever-growing number of platforms. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, Pinterest, Amazon — and now AI.

These problems created the perfect conditions for conversational commerce. When ChatGPT became one of the fastest-growing apps of all time, a new question emerged: how do we let people buy things through this?

That’s what ACP answers.

What We Learned

For the past year, Stripe and OpenAI explored and pressure-tested assumptions about what agentic commerce actually requires. Working with real businesses and real users shaped our view:

Trust is essential

AI agents can now initiate transactions on behalf of buyers. Businesses need ways to:

Confirm purchases are legitimate
Securely accept payment credentials
Respond to new fraud signals
Update risk models to tell good bots from bad bots

Fragmentation is painful

Businesses want to reach customers through new AI channels. But nobody wants to:

Build custom capabilities for each agent
Maintain dozens of bespoke integrations
Rebuild their stack every time a new AI platform launches

The AI economy needs standardized infrastructure.

Flexibility is required

Agents will enable commerce beyond simple one-time purchases:

“Buy for me” background capabilities
Multi-merchant carts
Usage-based models
Subscriptions and recurring purchases

Businesses want to support whatever comes next without rebuilding.

The Design Principles

ACP was built to solve these problems:

Principle	What It Means
Built for businesses	You stay the merchant of record. You control which products sell, how they’re presented, how transactions process, and how orders fulfill.
Works with existing systems	Connect any commerce backend and payments infrastructure. Build once, distribute to any ACP-compatible agent.
Supports complex flows	Physical goods, digital products, subscriptions, async purchases, in-store pickup, dynamic pricing — all supported.

How a Transaction Works

Here’s the flow from Stripe’s perspective:

Buyer

Discovers a product via AI
Selects what to buy
Picks a saved payment method or adds new one
Grants permission to initiate checkout

AI Agent

Shows products and checkout to buyer
Collects payment details
When buyer confirms, requests checkout from business

Business

Receives checkout request with secure payment credentials
Evaluates fraud signals
Accepts or declines the transaction
Fulfills the order as merchant of record

Payment Provider

Relays payment credentials via secure token
Token is programmatically controlled, permissioned, and logged
Business charges buyer using the token

Open by Design

ACP is:

Open source under Apache 2.0 license
Community-designed with input from businesses and developers
Payment-provider agnostic — works with any compatible provider

You implement once, then transact with any AI agent using any compatible payment provider.

For Stripe users: If you already process payments with Stripe, you can enable agentic payments by updating as little as one line of code. If you use another provider, you can still use Stripe for agentic payments.

The Vision

From Stripe:

“We’re focused on making ACP business-friendly, ready for any AI agent, and flexible across industries and business models. Working with partners like OpenAI helped us test against real-world complexity and make it flexible enough to support the future breadth of agentic commerce.”

This isn’t about one company or one AI assistant. It’s infrastructure for the next wave of commerce.

Get Involved

Implement the spec — Read the documentation
Join Instant Checkout — Apply for ChatGPT’s merchant program
Contribute — GitHub repository