Sierra and Meta announce Personal Agent Protocol, an open OAuth-based standard (with Shopify, Stripe, Walmart and more) for how personal AI agents work with businesses

Personal Agent Protocol (PAP), announced 2026-10-06 by Sierra's Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, is an open standard Meta and Sierra are building with Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. Today personal agents mostly drive websites like humans and fall back to support lines when that fails. PAP starts on the company website, where an agent discovers what the business offers, then opens an OAuth-based session on the user's behalf: first as a guest (stock checks, return policies), then with user-granted read-only or write access after sign-in. The session carries across channels. The business decides the execution route: its regular website, APIs built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI, or its own agent for conversational tasks like warranty claims. Planned extensions include finer-grained permissions, push notifications and payments without sharing card details. No spec text or benchmarks are public yet; a v0.1 specification, design workshops and a reference implementation are planned for later in October 2026. Teams with existing MCP servers or OpenAPI docs are best placed to adopt it early.