Meta is reportedly teaming up with Walmart, Stripe, and enterprise AI startup Sierra to publish a set of standards for how AI agents should interact with businesses online.

Called a “personal agent protocol,” the standards will reportedly help companies distinguish authorized personal agent purchases from others.

“We’re defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future,” Meta Superintelligence Labs vice president of engineering and consumer products, David Singleton, told CNBC. “If you think about email, it works great because it is a standard that everyone can use to talk to each other, and we think this is going to be quite similar.”

AI developers, as well as some online retailers and payment processors, have been betting big on agentic commerce. But there are still widespread concerns over potential safety and privacy problems that arise from giving AI agents access to your entire fortune and then letting them loose on the internet.

Last month, a group of six major global banks, including Capital One and Bank of America, released a paper, saying that agentic commerce needed to establish industry-wide standards, policies and consumer protections around five key principles —transparency, safety, privacy and data, choice, and interoperability— before aiming for more widespread acceptance.

A rise in agentic commerce could raise the rates of scams, fraud and disputes, the report claimed, and the agents could prioritize certain products or payment methods simply over incentives like higher commissions rather than going for the customer’s needs.

Privacy concerns have also specifically been an issue for Meta’s new personal AI agent Muse, which the tech giant launched on Sept.

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