How does ACP relate to Google's AP2?

They solve adjacent problems. ACP is a commerce flow — catalogs and delegated checkout between a merchant and an assistant. AP2 is a payment-authorization layer — signed mandates proving the user approved a purchase. They come from different camps (OpenAI/Stripe vs Google), and are not the same specification.

Glossary

What is Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)?

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) is an open standard, maintained by OpenAI and Stripe, for connecting buyers, their AI agents and businesses to complete purchases. Live since September 2025, it powers ChatGPT's Instant Checkout: merchants expose structured catalogs and a checkout flow that an assistant can complete on the user's behalf.

Last updated: August 2, 2026

ACP defines the merchant side of assistant-led shopping: structured product feeds an AI can ingest, and a delegated checkout the AI can drive while payment stays with the merchant's processor. In ChatGPT it appears as Instant Checkout, live with merchants from Etsy to a growing set of Shopify brands; OpenAI charges merchants a fee on completed purchases while the spec itself is open on GitHub.

The landscape is consolidating but not settled: Google announced a rival, coalition-backed Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) in January 2026, and most analyses expect large merchants to support several protocols at once (as of August 2026).

ACP today is consumer-shaped — catalogs, carts, single checkouts. B2B software purchasing runs on different objects: requirements, security questionnaires, pilots, quotes, multi-stakeholder approval. That structured pre-purchase conversation is the layer AgentDoor builds for. If ACP-style rails become the standard way an agent completes a transaction, the AgentDoor thesis is the same one applied upstream: the vendors that expose a structured door for evaluation will be the ones agents can actually buy from.

Sources: [1] [2] [3]

Frequently asked questions

How does ACP relate to Google's AP2?: They solve adjacent problems. ACP is a commerce flow — catalogs and delegated checkout between a merchant and an assistant. AP2 is a payment-authorization layer — signed mandates proving the user approved a purchase. They come from different camps (OpenAI/Stripe vs Google), and are not the same specification.

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