Meta, Walmart and Stripe publish open standard for AI agents

Meta, Walmart, Stripe and a handful of other companies are publishing what they call a "personal agent protocol," CNBC reported on 6 October. The open standard is meant to dictate how artificial intelligence agents can interact with businesses. Enterprise AI startup Sierra, co-founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is part of the group. Taylor, who is also chairman of OpenAI, is leading the initiative, according to CNBC.

Taylor told CNBC that companies have a lot of work to do to figure out how and when personal agents can access information. "Companies will know when it's a personal agent versus an actual person," Taylor said. He said many companies see a risk in giving access to a random bot that is not acting on behalf of a person. "It is kind of chaos until such a standard exists," Taylor said.

Meta's Muse, a personal agent launched in early September, has become the most popular version of personal AI agents, CNBC reported. It is at the top of Apple's App Store, ahead of ChatGPT. Amazon is among the companies that have blocked Meta's agents, citing worries of website scraping.

Amazon also blocked Perplexity's AI agent and sued the startup in November, alleging it took steps to "conceal" its AI agents so they could continue to scrape Amazon's website without approval. Perplexity called the lawsuit a "bully tactic."

Taylor compared the new standard with logging into other websites using Google or Facebook credentials, technology he worked on as Facebook's tech chief. He said it will help businesses know whether they are dealing with a bot and see what personal agents are doing on their sites. David Singleton, vice president of engineering and consumer products at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former technology chief at Stripe, highlighted security. He said customers need to share credit card and personal information for agents to work well, and that the standard creates some visibility and control.

"We're defining rails that we hope personal agents and business agents can run over for the future," Singleton said, comparing the standard to email. He said Muse already has millions of users in the U.S. and is "growing rapidly." OpenAI and Anthropic are not on board now, but Taylor said he expects the AI giants to participate and will be "really disappointed" if competitors do not use the standard. "The whole point of this is to be an open standard," Taylor said.