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Google Announces Revolutionary Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

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Great news! Google has announced the revolutionary Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) — an open standard for secure payments between AI agents. This is a serious step toward the future of autonomous commerce.

What is AP2?

AP2 is an open protocol developed with leading payments and technology companies to securely initiate and transact agent-led payments across platforms. The protocol works as an extension of Agent2Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP), creating a unified ecosystem for agentic payments.

More than 60 organizations are participating in the development, including giants like Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, Coinbase, Adyen, Salesforce, and many others.

Why is this needed?

The problem is that today's payment systems generally assume a human is directly clicking "buy" on a trusted surface. But with the emergence of autonomous agents, this fundamental assumption breaks down. AP2 solves three key problems:

  • Authorization: How to prove that a user gave an agent the authority to make a specific purchase?
  • Authenticity: How to ensure that an agent's request accurately reflects the user's intent?
  • Accountability: Who is responsible for fraudulent or incorrect transactions?

How it works: Mandates and Verifiable Credentials

The foundation of AP2 is Mandates—tamper-proof, cryptographically-signed digital contracts that serve as verifiable proof of a user's instructions.

Two usage scenarios:

  1. Real-time purchases: "Find me white running shoes" → Intent Mandate → product selection → Cart Mandate → payment
  2. Delegated tasks: "Buy concert tickets the moment they go on sale" → detailed Intent Mandate with conditions set in advance

New Commerce Possibilities

AP2 opens up completely new commerce models:

  • Smart shopping: Agent monitors products and automatically purchases when conditions are met
  • Personalized offers: Merchant agents create custom bundles based on buyer requests
  • Coordinated tasks: Booking flights and hotels simultaneously within budget

Cryptocurrency Support

Particularly interesting is that in collaboration with Coinbase, Ethereum Foundation, MetaMask and other leading organizations, the A2A x402 extension was launched — a production-ready solution for agent-based crypto payments.

Connection to FastMCP.me

By the way, if you're interested in MCP protocol integration, FastMCP.me supports most MCP servers and can easily connect to various AI systems: Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Claude, and others. It's the perfect platform for experimenting with agentic systems even before full AP2 implementation.

What's Next?

Google is calling for industry-wide collaboration. Technical specifications and reference implementations are already available in the public GitHub repository. This is just the beginning of a new era of AI commerce, where agents can safely and autonomously make purchases on behalf of users.

The agentic payments revolution has already begun, and AP2 could become the standard that unifies the entire ecosystem.