Meta and Sierra develop an open standard for AI agents

Meta, Sierra and several business partners are developing the Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard intended to let companies authenticate personal AI agents and see what those agents do on their platforms. The effort, led by Sierra cofounder Bret Taylor, is meant to establish rules for agents acting on behalf of consumers as they interact with businesses online. The partners named include Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. Taylor said the protocol is designed to authenticate agents, empower consumers and give businesses visibility into their activity, and that anyone will be able to implement it. Meta executive David Singleton has compared the aim to email, a widely used standard that allows different systems to communicate. Sierra says a first, v0.1 specification is due later in October. The initial release is not expected to cover payments. Sierra lists payments, push notifications and more detailed permissions as future extensions, so the protocol’s eventual scope will depend on later work. The technical requirements and how widely companies will adopt the standard remain unclear before the specification is published.