Learn / What is ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)?
What is ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol)?
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) is an open specification, driven by Stripe and OpenAI, for completing real purchases inside AI chat surfaces — an assistant finds a product, assembles a cart, and executes checkout with the user's stored payment credentials, without the user ever visiting the merchant's site.
What it's for
ACP targets consumer commerce: physical goods, subscriptions, bookings. That makes it very different from x402's machine-to-machine micropayments — ACP transactions look like normal human-sized purchases that happen to be arranged by an agent.
How it settles
ACP bridges existing card rails (and increasingly stablecoins) into agent surfaces. Merchants integrate once and become purchasable by any ACP-capable assistant.
Where it stands
ACP is live in early deployments inside major chat assistants. Its success metric is merchant coverage — the more catalogs agents can buy from, the more consumer spending moves into chat.
Frequently asked questions
How is ACP different from x402?
x402 meters machine-to-machine API consumption with stablecoin micropayments; ACP executes human-sized consumer purchases inside chat, mostly over card rails. They serve different transaction sizes and buyers.
Who backs ACP?
Stripe and OpenAI drive the specification, with a growing set of merchants and platforms adopting it.
Do consumers need crypto to use ACP?
No. ACP works with stored conventional payment methods; stablecoin settlement is an option, not a requirement.
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