Agents buying from businesses

A “Buy” button on product listings inside Google’s AI Mode and Gemini — checkout happens on Google’s surface with Google Pay, while the retailer stays the seller of record.

who Google; UCP co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart, endorsed by 20+ others including Adyen, American Express, Best Buy, Flipkart, Macy’s Inc., Mastercard, Stripe, The Home Depot, Visa and Zalando.

Google’s support page says the checkout feature “is available for select merchants at this time,” with product eligibility in the US, Canada and Australia; other merchants join via an interest form. Pays with cards saved in Google Wallet only, for now. Google also runs a separate “agentic checkout” feature that buys on a merchant’s own website at the customer’s direction. Hotel booking has joined the surface: announced 2026-08-27 (Google’s announcement) and confirmed operating in trade coverage 2026-09-01 (Hotel Dive), people in the US can book a hotel end-to-end in AI Mode in English and complete the reservation with Google Pay, with 10 launch partners including Booking.com, Choice Hotels, Expedia, Hilton, Marriott and Wyndham. Google says it “has started rolling out” and continues “over the coming weeks”; the hotel or booking platform acts as the merchant of record.

source Google merchant help — agentic checkout

The open standard behind Google’s agent checkout — a common language that lets shopping agents and store systems talk to each other, from finding a product to buying it.

who Google, with the industry partners above; compatible with A2A, AP2 and MCP.

Launched at NRF on 2026-01-11 (launch announcement); the 2026-03-19 update added multi-item carts, real-time catalog access and identity linking for loyalty benefits. The spec is public; shopper-facing checkout built on it is the limited program above.

source Google blog — UCP updates, 2026-03-19

For about five months, US ChatGPT users could buy select items from Etsy sellers and some Shopify merchants without leaving the chat.

who OpenAI, with Stripe.

Launched 2025-09-29; OpenAI pulled it in March 2026, saying the first version “did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide” and shifting to product discovery while merchants use their own checkouts (CNBC’s report with OpenAI’s statement). The protocol underneath it lives on — see ACP below.

source OpenAI — Buy it in ChatGPT

ChatGPT now focuses on finding and comparing products; buying happens through the retailer’s own checkout or through retailer apps inside ChatGPT.

who OpenAI, with merchant feeds and retailer-built apps (Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Instacart and others).

This is the model that replaced Instant Checkout: the assistant helps you decide, then hands you to the merchant to pay.

source CNBC report, 2026-03-24

Walmart runs its own shopping experience inside ChatGPT — with account linking, loyalty and Walmart’s own payments — plus its in-house agent Sparky for reorders and recipe-based carts.

who Walmart, partnered with OpenAI.

The partnership was announced 2025-10-14 around Instant Checkout (Walmart’s announcement); Walmart later withdrew from Instant Checkout and shipped its own in-app experience instead. Flagship’s tracker (2026-08-31) reports Walmart saying items sold via Sparky are up 4x year-over-year.

source CNBC report, 2026-03-24

Buy products directly inside Microsoft’s Copilot assistant, without being redirected to another site; the merchant stays the merchant of record.

who Microsoft, with PayPal, Shopify and Stripe as enabling partners.

US-only on Copilot.com at launch, with retailers such as Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Ashley Furniture and Etsy sellers; Microsoft’s ads blog describes it as “beginning to roll out.” Shopify merchants are auto-enrolled after an opt-out window.

source Microsoft news release, 2026-01-08

Complete a purchase inside a Perplexity answer; PayPal supplies the payment rails and the retailer stays the merchant of record.

who Perplexity, with PayPal.

Announced 2025-11-19 as a free US product rolling out the following week, reaching 5,000+ PayPal merchants; it replaced the earlier subscriber-only “Buy With Pro.” An independent tracker snapshot (2026-07-09) reports it still processing in-chat purchases.

source CNBC report, 2025-11-19

Inside the Amazon Shopping app, Amazon’s agent can buy an item from another brand’s website on your behalf when Amazon doesn’t sell it.

who Amazon (runs on Amazon Bedrock, using Amazon Nova and Anthropic Claude models).

A beta for a subset of US customers with a limited set of brand stores. The brand’s site handles delivery, returns and support. Amazon has not published newer scale figures for it.

source About Amazon news post, 2025-04-03

A free open-source blueprint for a business that wants a shopping agent inside its own site or app — the agent searches the catalog, compares options, answers order questions and fills the cart — plus a merchant agent for back-office work where every change waits for a person’s approval.

who Anthropic.

Build tooling, not a payment surface: the blueprint completes no checkout of its own — the repository states that nothing in it “places an order, charges a card, or changes a live listing”; checkout renders the cart for the business’s own systems to complete. Announced 2026-09-02 (Reuters report), published under Apache-2.0 on GitHub and described there as a reference implementation, not maintained. Anthropic’s pilot figures — cart size up about 30–35% for one partner, purchase completion about 60% likelier — are vendor-reported, with no published methodology.

source anthropics/commerce-agents — GitHub repository

A personal AI agent that Meta says can book travel, fill out forms, negotiate and complete a checkout on your behalf, and keep working after you close the app.

who Meta; checkout runs through Link by Stripe; Shop Pay and PayPal listed as payment options by Meta on 2026-09-24 (1Password still listed as “coming soon” at launch); flight booking runs through Duffel, a UK travel-infrastructure company.

US-only at launch — on the web (muse.ai), iOS and Android — with a free tier plus paid tiers at $20 and $100 a month (prices, not usage). The booking capability is uneven: an independent Skift test (reported via Travel Daily News, 2026-09-11) found flights are booked through a real connection to Duffel’s inventory (roughly 500 airlines) while hotels and cars are simulated — Muse operating a browser across consumer travel sites rather than a backend integration. Status is limited: US-only, newly rolling out, and the booking capability is only partly a real integration. Announced 2026-09-08. Update 2026-09-30 (Pulse #4): Shopify’s CEO announced Shop Pay checkout in Muse “on all Shopify stores” on 2026-09-21 (X post; reported by PYMNTS, 2026-09-22); PayPal announced Muse checkout “across PayPal merchants worldwide” on 2026-09-22 (X post; reported by PYMNTS; region wording differs between sources, no launch date); Meta’s Connect post of 2026-09-24 lists new connectors Walmart, Best Buy, American Eagle Outfitters, DICK’S Sporting Goods, Fanatics, Gap, Michael Kors, Sephora, Ulta and Wayfair “plus Shop Pay and PayPal for payments” (whether checkout at those retailers happens inside Muse is not stated), Expedia “coming soon”, and Instacart — which Instacart itself dated as “soon” on 2026-09-22. Amazon has blocked Muse from Amazon.com since the night of 2026-09-20 US time (TheStreet, 2026-09-23, citing Bloomberg; secondary sources only; confirmed in CNN’s 2026-09-23 hands-on test). Status stays limited: US-only, payment options announced by the parties but not independently confirmed working, hotels and cars still simulated, and one major retailer blocking access.

source Meta newsroom — Introducing Muse

A shopper-facing commerce agent that helps people discover and compare products and complete checkout inside a chat — one of seven named, job-specific Agentforce agents.

who Salesforce.

An agent a business deploys on its own commerce, not a consumer app. Salesforce says most of the seven Agentforce agents, Carter included, are generally available now; no independent usage figures have been published. Announced 2026-09-11.

source Salesforce newsroom — Agentforce job-ready agents

An open standard that gives an AI agent and a business a shared language for completing a purchase — order details, acceptance, payment hand-off.

who OpenAI and Stripe, open-sourced; adopted beyond ChatGPT (Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite is built around it, and Salesforce’s Agentforce Commerce supports it).

The spec outlived its first showcase: ChatGPT’s Instant Checkout retired in March 2026, but ACP remains the integration language Stripe ships to merchants.

source Stripe newsroom — Agentic Commerce Suite

A single Stripe integration that lets a business put its product catalog in front of AI agents and accept agent-driven orders — discovery, checkout, payments and fraud checks in one place.

who Stripe; early users include Coach, Kate Spade, URBN, Revolve, Ashley Furniture, and platforms Squarespace, Wix, Etsy, WooCommerce, commercetools and BigCommerce.

Launched 2025-12-11; by Sessions 2026 Stripe says merchants “can now sell through AI agents” from the Stripe Dashboard, with partnerships extending it to Meta ads and to Google’s UCP surfaces. Platform-level use (making a platform’s sellers agent-ready) was still a preview as of 2026-04-29.

source Stripe blog — Sessions 2026 announcements

A way to hand an agent the ability to pay from your Link wallet, with spending approvals and full purchase visibility kept in your hands.

who Stripe.

Announced as available (“you can now grant agents the ability to pay”) at Stripe Sessions 2026.

source Stripe blog — Sessions 2026 announcements

Rails for agents that pay programmatically — micropayments and recurring charges over MPP, settled in digital dollars (stablecoins) or ordinary cards via Shared Payment Tokens.

who Stripe; MPP co-authored with Tempo.

Stripe’s Sessions 2026 post says agents “can now programmatically transact” over MPP and businesses can accept agent payments via SPTs through the Payment Intents API. Radar’s bot-abuse prevention (telling legitimate agents from fraudulent ones) was a preview, not yet shipped, as of the same date.

source Stripe blog — Sessions 2026 announcements

Stripe’s hosted checkout pages offer a browser agent a short list of named actions — read the order summary, pick a payment method, fill the payment form, and submit where Stripe controls the button — instead of a page to read and guess at. WebMCP is a proposed browser standard for exactly that.

who Stripe.

Stripe says it “enabled WebMCP on all Stripe Checkout UIs” (full page, embedded form, Elements, hosted invoice page) on 2026-09-22, with no change needed by sellers, and marks the payment-submit tool as consequential so the agent must get the user’s confirmation first. Status is limited because the browser side is still a proposed standard in an experimental Chrome trial; Stripe’s own docs call WebMCP “an experimental browser capability” and tell agents to fall back to ordinary browsing when a tool is missing. Stripe’s efficiency figures (42% fewer tokens, 38% fewer tool calls) come from its own 60-run test on one fictional store, not field usage; “over 7.8M businesses” counts businesses using Checkout, not agent traffic. No count of agent purchases through WebMCP is published. Reported in Pulse #4.

source Stripe developer blog — How Stripe is designing Checkout for AI agents (2026-09-22)

An open protocol that lets an agent prove a real person authorized a purchase, using signed digital “mandates” that create an audit trail.

who Google, developed with 100+ partners; payment-method agnostic.

The protocol is published and adopted in products (Salesforce’s Agentforce Commerce supports AP2 alongside ACP, per Flagship 2026-08-31). Announced 2025-09-16 (announcement). Consumer-facing deployments built on it are earlier-stage — see the next entry.

source Google Cloud blog — PayPal and Google Cloud, 2025-10-27

A packaged offering for merchants: Google Cloud’s conversational shopping agent on the merchant’s own site, with a PayPal agent handling checkout over A2A and AP2.

who PayPal and Google Cloud.

The announcement is written in the future tense (“will allow merchants to rapidly deploy”); we found no primary source showing it operating for shoppers yet.

source Google Cloud blog — PayPal and Google Cloud, 2025-10-27

Visa’s platform for letting AI agents pay with tokenized Visa credentials — authentication, spending controls and fraud protections built around agent-initiated card payments.

who Visa.

Visa’s own page carries the disclaimer that the product “is currently in the process of deployment” and final features may differ. Introduced April 2025; pieces (Intelligent Commerce Connect, a developer CLI) are at different stages.

source Visa — Intelligent Commerce product page

A framework that lets a merchant’s website recognize a trustworthy shopping agent and tell it apart from malicious bots.

who Visa, developed with Cloudflare; feedback partners include Adyen, Checkout.com, Coinbase, Microsoft, Shopify, Stripe and Worldpay.

The spec has been “available today in the Visa Developer Center and GitHub” since 2025-10-14. It verifies agents; it is not itself a checkout. Initial specifications apply to the Visa network, with stated intent to align with standards bodies and with ACP and x402.

source Visa press release, 2025-10-14

A readiness score that tells merchants whether agents can actually navigate and buy on their site, and a directory of agents and merchants Visa has verified as legitimate.

who Visa; Agent Score created with New Generation. A strategic OpenAI partnership for Visa payments in agentic commerce was announced alongside.

Announced at Visa Payments Forum 2026; the release gives no general-availability date.

source Visa press release, 2026-06-10

A wallet-plus-rules service for AI agents: the agent gets Visa payment credentials it can actually use, and a policy engine decides what it may spend on.

who InFlow (founded by former PayPal executive Jim Nguyen), built on Visa Intelligent Commerce.

Launched May 2026, aimed first at agents buying business services (compute, data, APIs) rather than consumer shopping. Secondary source (named Forbes journalist carrying a Visa statement); no InFlow primary page verified yet.

source Forbes report, 2026-05-08

Mastercard’s program for agent-initiated card payments — the agent becomes a visible, governed participant in the payment flow, within limits the customer sets.

who Mastercard, with bank and processor partners.

Announced 2025-04-29. Real transactions have happened — Santander and Mastercard completed Europe’s first live end-to-end AI-agent payment on 2026-03-02 — but that release states plainly it was a pilot and “does not constitute a commercial rollout at this stage.”

source Santander press release, 2026-03-02

A planned payment layer for machine-to-machine commerce — agents and automated systems paying each other small amounts, continuously, across cards, accounts and digital dollars (stablecoins).

who Mastercard, with 30+ initial participants including Adyen, Ant International, Checkout.com, Cloudflare, Coinbase, Global Payments, Ripple, Solana Foundation, Stripe and Tempo, plus Mastercard Merchant Cloud on the acceptance side.

The release describes partners “collaborating to validate priority use cases” — a build phase, not a shipped product.

source Mastercard press release, 2026-06-10

A payment primitive for agents that make many tiny payments: a spending limit is authorized once on-chain, the agent spends against it off-chain — Solana’s own analogy is a bar tab or a prepaid meter — and the total settles in a single on-chain transaction.

who Solana (Solana Foundation), with Alibaba Cloud as launch partner; built to work across the x402 and MPP payment protocols.

Launched 2026-09-03 with the program open source and the spec public. Solana says Alibaba Cloud API endpoints are “live today” with Payment Channels, so an agent can meter-pay for those cloud services at launch. Solana’s “1 million payments per second” figure is the vendor’s own testing benchmark (100,000 wallets through a payment-channel proxy), and it counts payments — not dollars moved.

source Solana news post, 2026-09-03