Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Protocol: The Open Source Bet Against Google

What Is the Agentic Commerce Protocol?

The Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), co-developed by OpenAI and Stripe, is an open-source standard (Apache 2.0) that powers in-chat purchasing across AI platforms.

Unlike Google’s UCP, which is proprietary, ACP is designed to be platform-agnostic—any AI agent can use it.

How Stripe Powers It

When users are ready to buy in ChatGPT:

1. Stripe-powered checkout appears inline in the chat
2. Buyer uses preferred payment method (including Link, Stripe’s consumer payments product)
3. Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token (SPT)—a new payment primitive
4. SPT lets apps like ChatGPT initiate payment without exposing buyer’s credentials
5. SPTs are scoped to a specific merchant and cart total

Why Open Source?

Stripe and OpenAI are betting that an open standard will:

• Attract more merchants who don’t want lock-in
• Enable competitor adoption—even Microsoft and Perplexity could use ACP
• Accelerate ecosystem development faster than proprietary alternatives

The Business Model

For merchants:

• Free to be discovered in ChatGPT results
• Small fee only when a purchase is made
• Refunded if the item is returned

This is fundamentally different from Google’s CPC model, where merchants pay for visibility regardless of conversion.

The Stakes for Stripe

If ACP becomes the standard for AI commerce, Stripe captures payment processing fees across the entire ecosystem—not just OpenAI. This is Stripe’s play to become the infrastructure — as explored in the economics of AI compute infrastructure — layer for agentic commerce.

This is part of a comprehensive analysis. Read the full analysis on The Business Engineer.