AP2 is an open, shared protocol that provides a common language for secure, compliant transactions between agents and merchants, helping to prevent a fragmented ecosystem. It also supports different payment types–from credit and debit cards to stablecoins and real-time bank transfers.
Google is collaborating with a diverse group of more than 60 organizations to help shape the future of agentic payments, including Adyen, American Express, Ant International, Coinbase, Etsy, Forter, Intuit, JCB, Mastercard, Mysten Labs, Paypal, Revolut, Salesforce, ServiceNow, UnionPay International, Worldpay, and more.
Today, Google announced the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), an open protocol developed with leading payments and technology companies to securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms. The protocol can be used as an extension of the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol and Model Context Protocol (MCP). In concert with industry rules and standards, it establishes a payment-agnostic framework for users, merchants, and payments providers to transact with confidence across all types of payment methods.
AI agents are capable of transacting on behalf of users, which creates a need to establish a common foundation to securely authenticate, validate, and convey an agent’s authority to transact. While today’s payment systems generally assume a human is directly clicking „buy” on a trusted surface, the rise of autonomous agents and their ability to initiate a payment breaks this fundamental assumption and raises critical questions that AP2 helps to address, including:
Authorization: Proving that a user gave an agent the specific authority to make a particular purchase.
Authenticity: Enabling a merchant to be sure that an agent’s request accurately reflects the user’s true intent.
Accountability: Determining accountability if a fraudulent or incorrect transaction occurs.
AP2 is an open, shared protocol that provides a common language for secure, compliant transactions between agents and merchants, helping to prevent a fragmented ecosystem. It also supports different payment types–from credit and debit cards to stablecoins and real-time bank transfers. This helps ensure a consistent, secure, and scalable experience for users and merchants, while also providing financial institutions with the clarity they need to effectively manage risk.
AP2 builds trust by using Mandates—tamper-proof, cryptographically-signed digital contracts that serve as verifiable proof of a user’s instructions. These mandates are signed by verifiable credentials (VCs) and act as the foundational evidence for every transaction.
Mandates address the two primary ways a user will shop with an agent:
Real-time purchases (human present): When you ask an agent, “Find me new white running shoes,” your request is captured in an initial Intent Mandate. This provides the auditable context for the entire interaction in a transaction process. After the agent presents a cart with the shoes you want, your approval signs a Cart Mandate. This is a critical step that creates a secure, unchangeable record of the exact items and price, ensuring what you see is what you pay for.
Delegated tasks (human not present): When you delegate a task like, “Buy concert tickets the moment they go on sale,” you sign a detailed Intent Mandate upfront. This mandate specifies the rules of engagement—price limits, timing, and other conditions. It serves as verifiable, pre-authorized proof that can allow the agent to automatically generate a Cart Mandate on your behalf once your precise conditions are met.
In both scenarios, this chain of evidence culminates in securely linking your payment method to the verified contents of the Cart Mandate. This complete sequence—from intent, to cart, to payment—creates a non-repudiable audit trail that answers the critical questions of authorization and authenticity, providing a clear foundation for accountability.
AP2’s flexible design provides a foundation to support both simple and entirely new commercial models. Let’s consider a few examples below, which all assume Intent Mandates have been signed on behalf of a user:
Smarter shopping: A customer discovers a winter jacket they want is unavailable in a specific color, so they tell their agent: „I really want this jacket in green, and I’m willing to pay up to 20% more for it.” The agent then monitors prices and availability and automatically executes a secure purchase the moment that specific variant is found, capturing a high-intent sale that would have otherwise been lost.
Personalized offers: A shopper tells their agent they want a new bicycle for an upcoming trip from a specific merchant. Their agent communicates this information—which includes the trip’s date—to the merchant, whose own agent can respond by creating a custom, time-sensitive bundle offer that includes the bike, a helmet, and a travel rack at a 15% discount, turning a simple query into a more valuable sale.
Coordinated tasks: A user is planning a weekend trip and tells their agent: „Book me a round-trip flight and a hotel in Palm Springs for the first weekend of November, with a total budget of $700.” The agent can then interact with both airline and hotel agents, as well as online travel agencies and booking platforms, and once it finds a combination that fits the budget, it can execute both cryptographically-signed bookings simultaneously.
AP2 is designed as a universal protocol, providing security and trust for a variety of payments like stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. To accelerate support for the web3 ecosystem, in collaboration with Coinbase, Ethereum Foundation, MetaMask and other leading organizations, we have extended the core constructs of AP2 and launched the A2A x402 extension, a production-ready solution for agent-based crypto payments. Extensions like these will help shape the evolution of cryptocurrency integrations within the core AP2 protocol.
AP2 provides a trusted foundation to fuel a new era of AI-driven commerce. It establishes the core building blocks for secure transactions, creating clear opportunities for the industry–including networks, issuers, merchants, technology providers, and end users–to innovate on adjacent areas like seamless agent authorization and decentralized identity. We are committed to evolving this protocol in an open, collaborative process, including through standards bodies, and invite the entire payments and technology community to build this future with us.
Many of the partners building A2A agents have extended their support to AP2. This growing ecosystem will continue to make their agents available in our AI Agent Marketplace, including new, transactable experiences enabled by AP2. For example, enterprise companies could use AP2 for B2B applications, such as enabling autonomous procurement of partner-built solutions via Google Cloud Marketplace or the automatic scaling of software licenses based upon real-time needs.
„To get started, visit our public GitHub repository to review the complete technical specification, documentation, and reference implementations. Moving forward, this repository will be updated regularly with additional reference implementations from Google and innovations from the community to demonstrate the power and scalability of AP2.” – the company said.
Quotes from partners contributing to Agent Payments Protocol
Accenture: “Google Cloud’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) complements the Agent2Agent protocol and Model Context Protocol to provide a unified framework for agents to transact. Innovations like this will enable many of the agentic solutions that reinvent payments for clients – not only for today’s needs, but for the evolving models of future commerce.” – Scott Alfieri, Google Business lead at Accenture.
Adyen: „Agentic commerce is not just about a consumer-facing chatbot, but about the underlying infrastructure that powers it all. Adyen’s collaboration on Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is a natural extension of our mission to provide the merchants with the payments building blocks for tomorrow’s commerce. We’re excited to help establish a common rulebook that ensures security and interoperability for everyone involved in the payments ecosystem.” – Ingo Uytdehaage, Co-CEO at Adyen.
American Express: “With the rise of AI-driven commerce, trust and accountability are more important than ever. American Express is excited to contribute to the creation of AP2 as a protocol intended to protect customers and enable participation in the next generation of digital payments.” – Luke Gebb, EVP, Amex Digital Labs, American Express.
Ant International: „Ant International is excited to partner with Google on protocol-setting for practical AI applications in agentic commerce to unlock new merchant growth and elevate consumer experience, by leveraging our expertise in alternative payment methods and trusted AI innovations.” – Jiangming Yang, Chief Innovation Officer at Ant International.
Checkout.com: „Agentic commerce is reshaping the checkout moment, and Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is a pivotal step forward. At Checkout.com, we’re proud to support open protocols that strengthen trust and give merchants the flexibility to meet their customers where they are, however they want to shop.” – Meron Colbeci, Chief Product Officer, Checkout.com.
Coinbase: „x402 and AP2 show that agent-to-agent payments aren’t just an experiment anymore, they’re becoming part of how developers actually build. Bringing x402 into AP2 to power stablecoin payments made sense – it’s a natural playground for agents to start transacting with each other and testing out crypto rails. And it’s exciting to see the idea of agents paying each other resonate with the broader AI community.” – Erik Reppel, Head of Engineering at Coinbase Developer Platform.
Deloitte: “As Agentic Commerce rapidly emerges as a transformative force, the industry will need robust standards to empower AI agents to transact payments securely and effectively. These standards must address critical areas such as security, identity, frictionless commerce, trust, and privacy, all while providing compatibility with the existing global payments infrastructure. Deloitte is proud to help shape this evolving industry alongside Google, extending the widely adopted A2A protocol to enable agent-driven payments and commerce.” – Gopal Srinivasan, Alphabet Google Alliance Global AI & Data Leader at Deloitte Consulting LLP.
JCB: „JCB champions Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) initiative as the innovative and important protocol that will unlock a new era of payments, and JCB looks forward to contributing to the protocol to benefit our entire ecosystem, including our banking and payment institution partners, cardmembers, and merchants.” – Shinya Kubotera, Executive Officer & Head of Strategic Innovations at JCB co., Ltd.
Mastercard: “Mastercard is committed to ongoing, responsible innovation – and we are excited to be collaborating with Google, leading banks, merchants, AI platforms and other industry leaders to help shape the future of agentic commerce. These efforts include critical work with standards bodies such as the FIDO Alliance, where we are advancing verifiable credentials to capture and secure consumers’ intent in this dynamic new context.” – Pablo Fourez, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard.
MetaMask: “Blockchains are the natural payment layer for agents, and Ethereum will be the backbone of this. With Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and x402, MetaMask will deliver maximum interoperability for developers and will enable users to pay agents with full composability and choice—while retaining the security and control of true self-custody.” – Marco De Rossi, AI Lead at MetaMask.
Mesh: “For AI to truly drive commerce, agents need a secure and universal way to handle payments. Google’s new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is a huge step forward, providing the foundational framework to make this possible. We’re proud to support this effort because it unlocks the full potential of agent-led commerce, particularly with programmable assets like crypto. Our technology abstracts away the complexity of the crypto ecosystem, giving agents seamless access to hundreds of wallets and exchanges and supporting over 100 tokens. This ensures payments are not just completed, but are routed through the most efficient paths to guarantee speed and success.” – Bam Azizi, CEO and co-Founder at Mesh.
Mysten Labs: “Verified agents making purchases on behalf of verified users is the next frontier for AI-powered automation. Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) combines programmable payments via modern blockchains like Sui with open protocols like A2A and MCP that are enjoying rapid growth. It’s the perfect substrate for real-world agentic commerce.” – Sam Blackshear, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder at Mysten Labs, the original contributor to Sui.
PayPal: „AP2 provides the critical foundation for trusted agent payments, giving the ecosystem much needed clarity on how to facilitate trusted transactions. PayPal is fully aligned with this vision and excited to build on it, bringing our commerce expertise to help extend these principles across the entire purchase journey.” – Prakhar Mehrotra, SVP and Global Head of AI at PayPal.
PwC: „PwC is committed to fostering innovation with agentic AI that focuses on maintaining trust, safety and privacy for critical tasks like payments and money movement broadly. We believe the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and extension to the Agent2Agent protocol represent a significant leap forward, enhancing safety without compromising information.” – Scott Likens, Global / US Chief AI Engineering Officer at PwC.
Worldpay: “Worldpay shares Google’s vision of an open, interoperable foundation for agentic commerce, built on trust and safety to empower merchants and shoppers. The AP2 protocol represents a meaningful first step in defining how agents, merchants, and payment providers can transact securely, at scale.” – Cindy Turner, Chief Product Officer at Worldpay.
More details here: Powering AI commerce with the new Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
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