Definition
Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard and interaction model that enables programmatic commerce flows between buyers, AI agents, and businesses, standardizing how agents discover catalogs and initiate checkout.
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At its heart, the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is a universal language for the digital economy. Announced in September 2025 and co-developed by Stripe and OpenAI, this open standard bridges the gap between intelligent AI agents and the systems that power online stores. By providing a common set of rules, ACP allows an AI agent to understand a merchant’s inventory and facilitate a seamless shopping experience.
Think of ACP like a standardized plug for an appliance. Just as you don’t need a different wall outlet for every brand of toaster, merchants don’t need to build a custom connection for every AI assistant. With a single backend integration, a merchant can make their products available to multiple AI agents simultaneously, standardizing how agents interact with merchant infrastructure.
The protocol ensures that merchants remain in the driver’s seat. Regardless of how an AI agent facilitates the discovery or interaction, the merchant remains the Merchant of Record. This means they retain full control over critical business functions, including pricing, brand presentation, order acceptance, fulfillment, and returns, ensuring the customer relationship stays directly with the brand.
The ecosystem for this protocol has evolved significantly. While OpenAI retired its specific Instant Checkout feature in March 2026, the protocol itself continues to grow. Microsoft introduced Copilot Checkout in January 2026, leveraging ACP to enable in-chat purchases through partnerships with Stripe, PayPal, and Shopify. Because the protocol is open-source on GitHub under Apache 2.0, it is designed to be adopted across the broader ecosystem of AI-powered shopping, rather than being tied to a single platform.
For those exploring the future of digital retail, understanding ACP is essential to grasping how agentic commerce is maturing. It represents a shift from static, manual browsing to dynamic, AI-assisted purchasing. By standardizing these interactions, ACP helps move the industry toward a more integrated, efficient, and user-friendly experience for everyone involved.