Sierra and Meta publish Personal Agent Protocol, an OAuth standard for agents to log in to businesses

The protocol defines how a consumer's personal agent authenticates with a company and what it is allowed to do. Agents start as guests able to check stock or return policies, then gain scoped read or write permissions once the user signs in through OAuth, with sessions that persist across web, app and support channels. Businesses can expose themselves through their website, APIs using MCP or OpenAPI, or their own agent. Version 0.1 is due this month; payments and push notifications are listed as future extensions. The founding group is Sierra, Meta, Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. Stripe and Shopify have also signed on to Visa's competing Trusted Agent Protocol, and OpenAI and Stripe already run the Agentic Commerce Protocol for checkout, so the identity and permission layer is now contested by at least three camps. For builders shipping agents, the practical question is which handshake merchants will implement. A Meta-distributed standard with Walmart and Shopify behind it has a real shot at becoming the default agent login, and supporting it early is cheap insurance.