Agent Commerce
ACP
An open standard for programmatic commerce flows between buyers, AI agents and businesses, developed jointly by Stripe and OpenAI. It lets an AI platform initiate a transaction without becoming the merchant of record, passing payment credentials as tokens rather than raw details. REST and MCP compatible, Apache 2.0.
Why it matters
It was the first serious answer to who is the merchant of record when an agent buys, which is the question that decides liability, chargebacks and tax. That the answer keeps you as the merchant is the reason it was adoptable at all.
In practice
Adoption is largely a platform decision rather than a build. The operator work is making sure catalogue, price and availability are accurate, because ACP transmits whatever your systems assert.
Related terms