Meta and customer service agent company Sierra have launched the Personal Agent Protocol, or PAP, with Walmart, Shopify, Stripe, Genesys and Instinct participating in the effort.
PAP is built for personal AI agents. Its purpose is to help businesses verify an agent’s identity, determine which user it represents, and define what that user has authorized the agent to do.
Many personal agents still complete tasks by imitating how a human uses a website. They open pages, click buttons and fill out forms, which leaves them vulnerable to CAPTCHAs and anti-bot systems. Amazon had previously barred Meta Muse from accessing its shopping site. Even Walmart, which works with Muse, would surface human-verification checks that blocked the agent.
PAP is meant to standardize that identity-and-authorization relationship directly. If a user asks an agent to check an order, the agent could be granted read-only access. If the task is to modify an order or place a new one, that permission could be granted separately.
Businesses would also be able to set rules on what actions an agent can take and whether access should happen through the web, an API, or the company’s own agent infrastructure.
As described in the announcement, MCP focuses on how agents call external tools and data. PAP deals with agent identity, user authorization and enterprise permissions.
PAP remains in preview. Its first v0.1 specification is scheduled for release later this month.
On the same day, Sierra competitor Decagon open-sourced a similar protocol called PACT and said it had joined the PAP working group. PACT also addresses agent identity and user authorization. It uses A2A to connect personal agents with enterprise agents, then relies on OAuth to complete user authorization.