The Agent Payments Protocol describes what a user has authorized an agent to buy and how to pay, as signed mandates (verifiable digital credentials). It is available as an extension to A2A and UCP, and Google has donated its core specification to the FIDO Alliance.
Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)
The Agent Payments Protocol describes what a user has authorized an agent to buy and how to pay, as signed mandates (verifiable digital credentials). It is available as an extension to A2A and UCP, and Google has donated its core specification to the FIDO Alliance.
Where it stands
As of 2026-10-13, the Agentic Standards Map records:
Open protocol in the GitHub organisation google-agentic-commerce (Apache-2.0); latest release v0.2.0 of 2026-04-28, which “focuses on providing Human Not Present flows”; core specification donated to FIDO. Google announced the donation on 2026-04-28 (“We’re donating Agent Payments Protocol to the FIDO Alliance”); the FIDO release of the same day places the work in its Payments Technical Working Group, where the Google and Mastercard contributions are “providing an initial foundation for these specifications”, and announces an Agentic Authentication Technical Working Group. …
Why it matters to agents
AP2 is available as an extension for A2A and for UCP; its objects are mandates, signed Verifiable Digital Credentials, and the FIDO blog of 2026-05-26 names “Checkout Mandate: This captures the details about and conditions on what the user wants to buy.” and “Payment Mandate : This captures the details about and conditions on how the user wants to pay (amount, instrument, timing).” The docs say the Checkout Mandate is shared with the merchant, so the seller is a recipient of the user’s signed purchase terms. …
Sources
- https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-pay/agent-payments-protocol-fido-alliance/
- https://github.com/google-agentic-commerce/AP2/releases/tag/v0.2.0
- https://github.com/google-agentic-commerce/AP2/blob/main/docs/index.md
- https://fidoalliance.org/fido-alliance-to-develop-standards-for-trusted-ai-agent-interactions/
- https://fidoalliance.org/building-the-trust-layer-for-agentic-payments-with-ap2-and-verifiable-intent/
- https://github.com/google-agentic-commerce/AP2/issues/374
Status and relevance quoted, shortened, from the Agentic Standards Map by Francesco Marinoni Moretto, CC BY 4.0, https://frmoretto.github.io/agentic-standards-map/. The full entry, with every dated source, is in map.json under ap2.
Industry: payments
Related standards
Standards this one builds on, supersedes, profiles or is commonly deployed beside.
