Meta and Sierra Want to Give Your AI Agent a Handshake: Inside the Personal Agent ProtocolIf 2025 was the year AI agents...

Meta and Sierra Want to Give Your AI Agent a Handshake: Inside the Personal Agent ProtocolIf 2025 was the year AI agents learned to think, 2026 is the year they are learning to knock. On October 6, at Sierra Summit in San Francisco, Sierra co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor announced the Personal Agent Protocol (PAP) — an open standard co-developed with Meta that defines how a personal AI agent authenticates with a business, what it is allowed to do once inside, and how the whole interaction stays trustworthy. The founding partner list reads like a commerce and infrastructure dream team: Walmart, Shopify, Stripe, Rocket, Genesys and Instinct.It is a quietly enormous announcement. The race to build agentic commerce has so far produced a thicket of incompatible approaches, defensive walls, and outright bans. PAP is the most credible attempt yet to replace that chaos with a common handshake. The Problem: Agents Are Customers NowPersonal AI agents are no longer a futuristic demo. Peopl...