Personal Agent Protocol Draft Drops With OpenAI, Visa and PayPal on Board
Personal Agent Protocol, nicknamed Poppy, is the open standard from Sierra and Meta for AI agents acting for customers. Draft 0.1 is out, and 35 more partners joined.
- Sierra announced the protocol on Tuesday, October 6, with Meta and launch partners such as Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart.
- The new draft is Apache 2.0 licensed, built on OAuth and works with standards like OpenAPI and MCP.
- Payments are listed as a future extension, not part of the first spec.
in this block
Personal Agent Protocol just went from announcement to public draft, and the partner list got stacked. Sierra and Meta's open standard, nicknamed Poppy, defines how your personal AI agent talks to a company's website, APIs or support agent on your behalf. On October 9 Sierra published Draft 0.1 and added 35 design partners, including OpenAI, Visa, Mastercard and PayPal.
What actually happened
In a post by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, Sierra introduced the protocol as a way for companies to know when they're dealing with an agent and who it represents. Days later, the Sierra Poppy post said the response was "overwhelming" and published the draft.
The 35 new design partners include Adyen, Bank of America, BBVA, Chime, Cloudflare, Comcast, ElevenLabs, GEICO, Hertz, Mastercard, Nordstrom, Notion, Okta, OpenAI, PayPal, Plaid, Target, United Airlines, Venmo, Visa, Wells Fargo, Zapier and Zendesk, among others. They'll give feedback during the design process.
There's a small mismatch in the launch partner list. Sierra's Poppy post names NiCE alongside the original group, while Sierra's first announcement and coverage from The Next Web and The Paypers list Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart without it.
How Poppy works
The protocol defines five building blocks:
- Discovery: a company publishes one file at /.well-known/poppy.json describing how agents can interact and sign in.
- Sessions: the agent can start as a guest, for example to check stock or a returns policy, and must identify itself.
- Sign-in: the customer signs in through OAuth, and the agent gets a session token limited to the access the customer approved.
- One session across channels: the same token works for APIs, the website and chats with the company's own agent.
- Getting the job done: the company decides whether agents use its website, APIs or its own agent.
The official docs mark it as Draft 0.1, updated October 9. The Paypers adds that the partners plan design workshops and a reference implementation, with possible extensions for finer permissions, push notifications and payments without sharing card details.
Who is behind it, and the rival camp
Rocket's CTO Shawn Malhotra said Rocket and Redfin are building with Sierra so a Meta Muse agent can move from finding a home to securing financing. Stripe's Kevin Miller said customers sending an agent expect the same service they'd get themselves. Genesys CEO Tony Bates described personal AI as a new front door to the enterprise, arguing brands need a trusted way to know who an agent represents, what it may do and what it intends.
Meta's role matters here. The Next Web notes Muse launched about four weeks before the announcement and pays with saved cards through Stripe's Link. So Meta already has a consumer agent that needs exactly this kind of handshake with businesses.
The Next Web points out a twist: Stripe and Shopify had already joined Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, along with Microsoft and Worldpay. Now Visa itself is a Poppy design partner. Standards wars in agentic commerce are getting crowded, and the Personal Agent Protocol is betting on breadth.
The Next Web also flags a European gap. Stripe, with dual headquarters in San Francisco and Dublin, was the only launch partner with a European base, and payments regulation there wasn't written for software approving transactions.
Why it matters
Right now, agents often log in as you and click through pages built for humans. That's fragile and opaque for businesses. A standard handshake could make agent shopping and support less sketchy, if companies actually publish the poppy.json file. For a different take on agent identity, see our IBM agent identity piece and the personal agent gateway story.
What to do as a reader
If you run a site or app, read the draft now and decide whether you want agents on your website, your APIs or your own support agent. Early design partners shape the spec, and the Personal Agent Protocol is still at 0.1.
If you just use AI agents, don't hand them broad account access yet. Prefer read-only permissions where possible and watch for companies that actually support scoped tokens. Nothing here is investment advice.
Not financial advice. DYOR, ser.
