agentic commerce
In plain wordsShopping and payments carried out by AI agents for people — finding products, comparing offers and completing purchases — within limits the person has approved.
Commerce in which AI agentsAI agent, n.: An AI system that does not just answer but acts: given a goal, it decides on steps, uses tools such as a browser or code editor, checks the results and keeps going until the job is done. act for consumers or businesses across the buying process — discovering products, comparing offers, negotiating, ordering and paying. It needs infrastructure beyond ordinary e-commerce: machine-readable catalogs and checkout endpoints, ways for merchants to verify that an agent is authorized (agent identityagent identity, n.: The ways of proving which AI agent is acting, for whom and with what permissions — so websites, companies and other agents can tell trustworthy agents from impostors and hold someone responsible.), payment credentials that can be delegated with spending limits (tokenized or single-use), auditable proof of what the user approved, and rules for liability when an agent errs. Competing open protocols emerged in 2025: OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol, behind ChatGPT's Instant Checkout; Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), which records user approval as cryptographically signed 'mandates'; and x402, an open standard begun by Coinbase and now hosted by the Linux Foundation, which revives the HTTP 402 'Payment Required' status code so that clients can pay per request, mainly in stablecoins. Risks include fraud, prompt injectionprompt injection, n.: Tricking an AI system by slipping in text that it mistakes for instructions — for example, a hidden line in an email telling an AI assistant to forward the user's messages to a stranger. into purchasing decisions and manipulation of agents by sellers.
In agentic commerce the merchant's first customer may be the shopper's agent, not the shopper.
Origin
The phrase spread in 2025 as payment networks and AI developers prepared for agent-initiated purchases: Visa and Mastercard announced agent-payment programs in the spring, Google announced AP2 on 16 September 2025 with more than 60 partner organizations, and OpenAI launched Instant Checkout with the Agentic Commerce Protocol on 29 September 2025.
Usage note
Unsettled consumer-protection questions include who bears an unwanted purchase, how disclosures reach a human, and whether sellers may target agents with tailored content. The acronym ACP is ambiguous: it also named IBM's Agent Communication Protocol, merged into the Agent2Agent protocolAgent2Agent protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI agents built by different companies find each other, say what they can do and work together on tasks, much as email lets different mail systems exchange messages..
Related
- agent identityagent identity, n.: The ways of proving which AI agent is acting, for whom and with what permissions — so websites, companies and other agents can tell trustworthy agents from impostors and hold someone responsible.
- AI agentAI agent, n.: An AI system that does not just answer but acts: given a goal, it decides on steps, uses tools such as a browser or code editor, checks the results and keeps going until the job is done.
- Agent2Agent protocolAgent2Agent protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI agents built by different companies find each other, say what they can do and work together on tasks, much as email lets different mail systems exchange messages.
- browser agentbrowser agent, n.: An AI agent that uses a web browser on your behalf — searching, clicking links, filling in forms and reading pages — to complete tasks such as booking, shopping or gathering information.
- prompt injectionprompt injection, n.: Tricking an AI system by slipping in text that it mistakes for instructions — for example, a hidden line in an email telling an AI assistant to forward the user's messages to a stranger.
- agentic AIagentic AI, n.: AI built to pursue goals on its own — planning, taking actions and adjusting along the way — instead of only responding to one prompt at a time. 'Agentic' describes how much of this independence a system has.
Sources
- OpenAI (2025). Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol. 29 September 2025. openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt
- Google Cloud (2025). Announcing Agent Payments Protocol (AP2). 16 September 2025. cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/announcing-agents-to-payments-ap2-protocol
- x402 Foundation. x402: an open, neutral standard for internet-native payments. x402.org
Mentioned in
agentagent, n.: Something that acts. In AI, a program that observes its situation and takes actions toward a goal: a game-playing learner, a software helper, or a chatbot that uses tools to complete tasks., Agent2Agent protocolAgent2Agent protocol, prop. n.: An open standard that lets AI agents built by different companies find each other, say what they can do and work together on tasks, much as email lets different mail systems exchange messages., τ-benchτ-bench, prop. n.: A test of AI customer-service agents in which a simulated customer, played by another AI, chats with the agent, which must use company tools and follow written rules to resolve the request., agent identityagent identity, n.: The ways of proving which AI agent is acting, for whom and with what permissions — so websites, companies and other agents can tell trustworthy agents from impostors and hold someone responsible., Vending-BenchVending-Bench, prop. n.: A test in which an AI agent runs a simulated vending-machine business for months — ordering stock, setting prices, paying fees — to see whether it stays sensible and profitable over a long time.