Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

ACP is a checkout protocol. Its scope spans checkout APIs, payment delegation via secure tokens, capability negotiation, cart and order management, discounts, authentication, and an MCP integration path.

The design intent is that the AI agent facilitates the transaction while the merchant stays the merchant of record. The buyer's payment credential is delegated as a token rather than handed over, the merchant keeps the customer relationship and the fulfilment obligation, and the agent does not become a reseller. That structure is what makes it adoptable by merchants who would otherwise be handing their customer to a marketplace.

This gets misreported often enough to be worth stating flatly. Per the ACP repository, the specification is "jointly governed by OpenAI and Stripe as Founding Maintainers, with a clear path toward broader community governance," and the future path is described as "neutral foundation stewardship as ecosystem matures."

So: two vendors, beta status, foundation governance aspirational rather than actual. Contrast with MCP, which was actually donated to a Linux Foundation directed fund in December 2025. Articles that lump the two together as "foundation-governed open standards" are wrong about ACP, and if you are making an integration-sequencing decision the difference is material.

ACP was designed around consumer-shaped transactions: known price, card payment, immediate checkout. B2B commerce breaks several of those assumptions at once.

Pricing is contract-specific and frequently not published. Payment is on terms against a credit account, not a card. Many transactions are quotes rather than orders, involve freight quoting on oversized items, and require an approval workflow on the buyer's side. Tax exemption certificates, PO numbers, and job-site delivery addresses all have to travel with the order.

None of that makes ACP irrelevant, and the near-term B2B story is more likely to be the buyer's own procurement agent than a public shopping assistant. But a distributor evaluating where to spend integration budget this year should weigh checkout protocols against the far more certain payoff of being findable and answerable first. Feeds, checkout, and live data ranks the options.

Any agentic checkout path assumes a product record clean enough to transact against: a stable identifier that does not change between sessions, an unambiguous unit of measure, a real pack quantity, and availability the merchant can honour.

OpenAI's product feed specification makes one of these explicit as a hard requirement — product and variant identifiers must stay stable over time. That is precisely the rule an ERP migration or a warehouse re-rack tends to break, and it is a data-governance commitment rather than an engineering task.