Commerce is on the cusp of another seismic shift, and this time, artificial intelligence is leading the charge directly to your digital wallet. Today, Stripe and OpenAI unveiled the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), an open standard designed to let AI agents, like ChatGPT, buy things for you directly within a conversation. This isn't just about recommendations; it's about AI initiating and completing purchases on your behalf.
The immediate impact is already live: ChatGPT users in the US can now leverage "Instant Checkout" to buy from US Etsy sellers, with a rollout to over a million Shopify merchants, including big names like Glossier and SKIMS, slated for the near future. This marks a significant leap from traditional e-commerce, where users navigate to a store, to a future where the store comes to the AI, and the AI handles the transaction.
Stripe and OpenAI have been quietly stress-testing this concept, identifying key pain points that ACP aims to solve. For consumers, it’s about securely buying where they discover. For businesses, it’s about tapping into new AI-powered sales channels without sacrificing brand control, customer relationships, or getting bogged down in bespoke integrations for every new AI agent. Crucially, the protocol is built to ensure AI agents can facilitate transactions without ever exposing your sensitive payment credentials directly.
Trust, fragmentation, and flexibility emerged as the core challenges. Businesses need robust fraud detection for "good bots" versus "bad bots," and a standardized way to reach customers across diverse AI platforms without building custom APIs for each. ACP, an Apache 2.0 licensed open standard, is Stripe’s answer, drawing on its 15 years of payments expertise to create a framework that’s business-friendly, consumer-trusted, and powerful for agents.
The Mechanics of AI-Powered Shopping
At its heart, ACP orchestrates a secure four-way handshake. A buyer discovers a product via an AI, grants permission, and the AI agent then initiates a checkout request with the business. The business, remaining the merchant of record, receives secure, tokenized payment credentials from the AI agent via its payment provider (which can be Stripe or any other ACP-compatible service). This tokenized system ensures that sensitive card details are never directly handled by the AI agent itself, addressing a major security concern.
This isn't just for simple, one-time purchases. The protocol is designed to support complex commerce flows, from physical and digital goods to subscriptions, multi-merchant carts, and even asynchronous "buy for me" capabilities. Imagine your AI assistant not just finding you the best deal on groceries, but actually ordering them for pickup, managing dynamic pricing, and handling subscriptions, all from within your chat interface.
Stripe emphasizes that businesses retain full control over their products, presentation, and fulfillment. ACP integrates with existing commerce backends, meaning merchants can "build once" and distribute across any ACP-compatible AI agent. This move by Stripe and OpenAI isn't just about a new checkout button; it's about laying the foundational infrastructure for an entirely new paradigm of commerce, where AI becomes an active participant in the buying process, not just a recommendation engine. The future of shopping just got a whole lot more agentic.
Any business or AI platform can implement the ACP spec to participate in agentic commerce, helping buyers discover and transact directly within AI interfaces.
Any AI agent can call an ACP-enabled checkout. Businesses can then choose to accept or decline transactions on a per agent, per transaction, or custom logic basis. OpenAI is the first AI platform to implement ACP with Instant Checkout in ChatGPT.
No, each AI platform will manage their own process for how businesses can participate. If your business wants to participate in Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, you'll need to apply. We'll post additional AI platforms that adopt ACP on this site along with instructions for how to participate.
Businesses can use ACP with any compatible PSP—Stripe is the first compatible PSP with its Shared Payment Token. If you're a business on Stripe, you can learn more about Stripe's agentic commerce solutions in its documentation.
Stripe is working to create discovery mechanisms for AI platforms to identify businesses that have implemented ACP. AI platforms interested in adopting ACP can reach out to [email protected].
