Meta and Sierra announce Personal Agent Protocol, an open standard for how people's AI agents deal with businesses

Sierra, the customer-service agent company led by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, announced Personal Agent Protocol on 6 October. In their post, the open standard is one Meta and Sierra are developing with partners at Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart, and it defines how personal agents interact with businesses.

The protocol sets how an agent finds what a business offers, whether it acts as a guest or signs in as the customer, and whether the customer gives it read-only or write access. A business chooses how agents reach it: through its website, through APIs built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI, or through the business's own agent. “The session is built on OAuth, an established standard for authorizing access.”

Nothing is published yet. Sierra says the partners plan to publish the v0.1 specification later this month, hold design workshops and release a reference implementation. The post gives no adoption figures. Meta's role is as Sierra states it; no Meta post was opened.

The announcement comes a day after TikTok unveiled its own shopping agent and checkout, with Shopify and Stripe among its partners too.

• Confirmed Announced 6 October, with Meta as co-developer and Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart as partners. Sierra
• Claimed The v0.1 specification is to be published later this month, followed by a reference implementation. Sierra
• Confirmed Sessions are built on OAuth, and businesses can expose a website, MCP or OpenAPI APIs, or their own agent. Sierra