ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)
An open standard from OpenAI and Stripe for letting an AI assistant complete a purchase with a merchant, settling on existing card rails.
The Agentic Commerce Protocol describes how an assistant hands a purchase to a merchant: the assistant carries the buyer's intent and payment credential, the merchant keeps the order, the fulfilment and the customer relationship. Settlement runs on the card rails that already exist.
It is aimed squarely at consumer shopping inside a chat interface, and its strength is that merchants do not have to change how they get paid. That is also its boundary: it assumes a merchant, a catalogue, and a human whose card is on file.
It answers a different question from x402. ACP is about a person buying a product through an agent. x402 is about one machine paying another for a resource, per request, with no account on either side.
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