Google has introduced a new payments protocol that lets artificial intelligence (AI) agents make purchases on behalf of shoppers.
The system, called the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), is supported by more than 60 merchants and financial institutions. It is designed for AI agents that can shop and complete transactions at a consumer’s request. Google said AP2 is interoperable across platforms, payment systems and vendors, and includes full audit trails so transactions can be traced.
In a blog post Tuesday, Google executives Stavan Parikh and Rao Surapaneni said the protocol was created with openness and transparency in mind. The company has open-sourced AP2 and published its full specifications on GitHub. Google said it expects the system to evolve in collaboration with industry partners and standards bodies to ensure regulatory compliance for agent-driven payments.
“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,” they wrote, envisioning a future where humans and retailers routinely rely on AI agents.
Parikh and Surapaneni said the protocol could make shopping more convenient by enabling AI agents to surface the best available deals. They cited the example of a user asking a chatbot to buy a bicycle, prompting a time-sensitive offer from a retailer’s own AI system. In another scenario, they said an AI agent could negotiate with airline and hotel systems, as well as online travel agencies, and then confirm both bookings at once with cryptographic signatures once it finds an option that meets the user’s budget.
Google said AP2 is built as a universal protocol that can handle a range of payment types, including stablecoins and cryptocurrencies. To support the web3 ecosystem, the company has worked with Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation, MetaMask and others to create an extension called A2A x402, which enables agent-based crypto payments. Google said such extensions are expected to guide how cryptocurrency capabilities are integrated into the core AP2 standard. AP2 can also be used as an extension of the Agent2Agent protocol and Model Context Protocol.
Development of AP2 adds a significant new wrinkle to retail applications for AI agents, whose new browser-based tools can navigate websites and menus much like humans do. They can already search for low-cost flights or hotels, and businesses are using them to compare suppliers and pricing.
For now, most AI agents can research products and services but stop short of completing transactions, leaving the final step to the user.
Google’s AP2 protocol is intended to automate that process.
