AP2

AP2 addresses the "was this payment actually authorized?" problem for agent commerce. It does not move money itself; it standardizes verifiable mandates that prove a payment was consented to and bounded.

v0.2 (April 2026) reorganized the mandate model from three types (Intent, Cart, Payment) into two — Checkout Mandate and Payment Mandate — each of which can be Open (pre-authorized constraints) or Closed (bound to a specific transaction). This gives Human-Not-Present flows a structured authorization model: users define bounded authority in advance, agents act without per-step approval, and merchants receive verifiable evidence that the transaction stayed within the granted authority.

• Open Checkout / Payment Mandates. Capture what the agent is allowed to buy and spend within user-defined limits.
• Closed Checkout / Payment Mandates. Signed by the authorized agent after confirming the transaction matches the user's constraints, producing a cryptographic link between authorization, checkout, and payment.
• Receipts. Checkout and Payment Receipts provide post-transaction evidence for audit and dispute.

Verifiable Intent, co-developed with Mastercard and also donated to FIDO, complements AP2 by creating tamper-proof, portable evidence of user authorization that issuers, networks, and merchants can independently validate.

Google donated AP2 and Verifiable Intent to the FIDO Alliance in April 2026. The core specification is now developed within FIDO's Payments Technical Working Group and Agentic Authentication Technical Working Group; the GitHub repository hosts SDKs and samples only. AP2 is deliberately rail-agnostic: it sits above card networks, bank transfers, and stablecoin execution protocols.