Meta, Walmart, Stripe Back Bret Taylor's Personal Agent Protocol

The Personal Agent Protocol arrives as AI companies including Meta, with its personal agent Muse, are betting on agentic commerce — the idea that people will simply use agents to buy things for them online. Muse launched only last month but has already become one of the most downloaded applications in Apple's App Store, and it has drawn privacy and security concerns, including a report that Meta engineers raced to fix vulnerabilities before launch and a ban from Amazon's retail platform after the agents failed to identify themselves.

Meta, Sierra and their partners appear to be responding to a call from six major banks, including Bank of America and Capital One, which published a paper last month urging the AI industry to establish standards, policies and consumer protections around transparency, safety, privacy and data, choice and interoperability. Taylor told CNBC there "will be chaos until such a standard exists" that ensures visibility into what personal agents do on retailer websites, and he expects OpenAI to back the standard in the future.

Meta has good reason to want the standard to take hold: according to a Citigroup report earlier this week, Muse could generate upwards of $27 billion in revenue for the company by the end of the decade. Whether the protocol becomes widely adopted would hinge on buy-in from retailers and payment providers beyond the founding partners, and on whether it eases the privacy and security worries that have already limited Muse's reach on at least one major retail platform.