Google’s agent-payment protocol goes neutral: AP2 v0.2 donated to FIDO
28 April 2026
What happened
Google released version 0.2 of the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and donated the protocol to the FIDO Alliance for community governance, with 60+ organisations involved — including Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Adyen, Coinbase, Etsy, Forter, Intuit, JCB, Revolut, Salesforce, ServiceNow, UnionPay International and Worldpay. AP2 was first announced in September 2025. Version 0.2 adds two things that matter: “Human Not Present” payments, where an agent completes a pre-authorised purchase without the human on the call, within conditions set in advance (for example a brand and a price cap); and Verifiable Intent, a tamper-proof log of user-authorised agent actions, co-developed with Mastercard and also donated to FIDO.
What AP2 does, and does not do
AP2 authorises; it does not settle. It proves, with cryptographically signed mandates, that a buyer authorised an agent’s transaction: an Intent Mandate (what the agent may do), a Cart Mandate (the exact items and price), and a Payment Mandate (the signal to the network that an agent is involved). Payment processing itself belongs to payment processors, not to AP2. It is method-agnostic: cards today, with a roadmap including real-time bank transfers and digital currencies.
Why it matters for consumers
A vendor protocol becoming a neutral standard is what lets agents pay across merchants instead of inside one company’s walled garden. Standards-body governance is also how regulated payment infrastructure normally absorbs a new transaction class: the rules for proving authorisation, and for disputing a payment, get written in the open rather than in one vendor’s terms of service. That is the difference between “an agent that can pay” and “an agent you can trust with your money.”