Meta, Walmart, Stripe push "personal agent protocol"

The push comes a month after Meta launched Muse, its personal agent, which turned into a viral sensation and is now the most popular version of such agents since hitting the market in early September. Muse soared to the top of Apple's App Store and remains there, ahead of ChatGPT. Not every company has welcomed that wave: Amazon has blocked Meta's agents over worries about website scraping, and it also blocked Perplexity's AI agent and sued the startup in November, alleging it concealed its agents to keep scraping Amazon's site without approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a 'bully tactic.'

The protocol's backers frame it as plumbing rather than a product. Taylor compared it with logging into websites using Google or Facebook credentials, work he did as tech chief at Facebook, and said it will help with authentication and give visibility into what agents do on sites. Meta's David Singleton, a former Stripe technology chief, said customers need to share credit card and personal information for agents to work well, and the standard adds a level of visibility and control. He compared it to email, calling it rails that personal agents and business agents can run over.

Whether the standard takes hold may hinge on adoption by the AI companies that are not yet on board. Singleton said Muse already has millions of users in the U.S. and is growing rapidly, with people using it to sign kids up for classes, buy gifts and schedule dentist appointments. If OpenAI and Anthropic join, the protocol could become the common ground businesses use to judge which agents to let in; if they stay out, companies may face competing rules instead.