Over the past few decades, commerce has shifted in distinct waves—from physical stores to ecommerce, from one-size-fits-all catalogs to personalized recommendations, and from desktop to mobile shopping. Customers have always adapted, learning how to search, trust online checkouts, and click “buy now.” With the rise of AI, commerce is approaching another fundamental change. 

Today, we announced that Stripe is powering OpenAI’s newly launched commerce experience: Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. ChatGPT users in the US can now buy from US Etsy sellers—and, coming soon, from over a million Shopify merchants, such as Glossier, Vuori, Spanx, and SKIMS—directly in chat.

Instant Checkout is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), a new open standard codeveloped by Stripe and OpenAI that enables programmatic commerce flows between buyers, AI agents, and businesses. It provides a blueprint for how businesses can make their checkouts agent-ready so that customers using AI agents, such as ChatGPT, can buy products directly from where they’re discovering them.

The ACP specification is available for businesses and AI agents to implement starting today. If your business is interested in participating in Instant Checkout in ChatGPT or you want to get access to other AI agents, please reach out.

What we’ve heard

For the past year, we’ve been exploring and pressure-testing our assumptions in agentic commerce, and working with all of you has shaped our view of what’s required: customers should be able to securely buy where they discover; businesses should be able to sell through new channels without giving up trust, brand, or control; and AI agents should be able to enable transactions without exposing customer credentials. Through testing with real users, we’ve learned:

• Trust is essential. With AI agents now capable of initiating transactions on behalf of buyers, businesses need a way to confirm purchases, securely accept payment credentials, respond to new fraud signals, and update their risk models to differentiate good bots from bad bots.
• Fragmentation is painful. Businesses want to reach more customers through new agentic channels, but they don’t want to build custom capabilities for each agent nor maintain dozens of bespoke integrations. The AI economy needs standardized infrastructure to flourish.
• Flexibility is required. Agents will enable new types of commerce beyond one-time, one-merchant synchronous purchasing, such as “buy for me” background capabilities, multi-merchant carts, and usage models. Businesses want to support any new flows without rebuilding their stack.

An open protocol for agentic commerce

Businesses need to manage the balance of increasing conversion, minimizing fraud, and growing long-term customer relationships. Stripe has been helping the world’s fastest-growing businesses succeed online for more than 15 years, and we drew on this experience to make ACP optimized for businesses, trusted by consumers, and powerful for agents. 

• Built for businesses: With ACP, you maintain your customer relationships as the merchant of record, retaining control over which products can be sold, how they’re presented, how transactions are processed, and how orders are fulfilled.
• Designed to work with your existing systems: ACP can connect with any commerce backend and payments infrastructure. You don’t need to build custom inventory or payments connections for each individual AI agent you want to sell through. Instead, with ACP, you build once and can distribute to any ACP-compatible AI agent.
• Supports complex flows: ACP supports flexible configurations for many commerce types, including physical and digital goods, subscriptions, and asynchronous purchases. Our goal is to make the specification support custom checkout capabilities, such as managing in-store pickups or dynamic pricing, through AI agents.

ACP is open source, Apache 2.0 licensed, and community-designed. You can implement the specification to transact with any AI agent using any compatible payment provider.

How it works: A transaction powered by ACP

Here’s how ACP works for buyers, AI agents, businesses, and payment providers:

• Buyer: The buyer discovers a product or service via an AI surface, selects what they want to buy, picks a saved payment credential or adds a new one, and grants permission to initiate a checkout through the AI agent. 
• AI agent: The agent interfaces with the buyer, showing products, displaying checkout, and collecting payment details. When the buyer confirms, the agent makes a request to the business to initiate checkout on behalf of the buyer. 
• Business: The business receives a checkout request and secure payment credential details from the AI agent. The business can choose to accept or decline the transaction using payment and fraud signals, and is the merchant of record. 
• Payment provider: The AI agent communicates with the business’s payment provider to relay payment credentials via a secure token for the business to charge the buyer. The use of the token is programmatically controlled, permissioned, and logged.

How to get started 

To learn how to configure your checkout for agentic commerce, read the ACP specification.

To get ready for Instant Checkout in ChatGPT or sell through future AI agents, please reach out to our team. If you already process payments with Stripe, you will be able to enable agentic payments in your existing integration by updating as little as one line of code. If you currently process with another provider, you can still use Stripe for agentic payments. To learn more, read our docs.

We’re focused on making ACP business-friendly, ready for any AI agent, and flexible across industries and business models. Working with partners such as OpenAI helped us test the ACP against real-world complexity, and made it flexible enough to support the future breadth of agentic commerce. We invite anyone to help improve ACP; learn more at agenticcommerce.dev.