AP2 changing

What it is

AP2 solves the trust problem in agent shopping: when an agent pays, how does the merchant know the human actually agreed to this purchase at this price? Google announced it on September 17, 2025 with more than sixty partners including Mastercard, PayPal, American Express, Adyen, Coinbase, Etsy and Salesforce, and later handed it to the FIDO Alliance so it stays vendor-neutral.

How it works

The user’s authorization is captured as mandates, signed documents carried as W3C Verifiable Credentials:

• Intent mandate: what the user asked for and the limits they set. Auditable context for the whole interaction.
• Cart mandate: an unchangeable record of the exact items and price the user approved.

The specification also defines a Payment mandate that carries the instruction to the payment network. Together they form a tamper-evident audit trail. AP2 is rail-agnostic: cards, real-time bank transfers and stablecoins are all supported. It is defined as an extension of A2A and MCP, and the A2A x402 extension, built with Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation and MetaMask, covers the crypto path via x402.

v0.2.0, released April 28, 2026, added human-not-present flows, where the user pre-authorizes and the agent completes the purchase later, for example when tickets go on sale.

When to use it

Your agent buys things on behalf of a person, and the merchant or network needs proof of authorization. If you are the merchant wanting to appear in an assistant, see UCP or the Agentic Commerce Protocol.

Watch out for

• Still pre-1.0. Mandate schemas can change.
• Verifiable Credentials bring their own key management. Budget for it.