News of the Week

FIDO Alliance launches agentic working groups with AP2 and Verifiable Intent

On April 28, the FIDO Alliance announced it is forming two new technical working groups dedicated to agentic commerce, with Google donating its Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Mastercard contributing its Verifiable Intent framework as the foundational specs the groups will build on.

The Agentic Authentication Technical Working Group is chaired by members from CVS Health, Google, and OpenAI, with vice-chairs from Amazon, Google, and Okta. The Payments Technical Working Group, focused on agent-initiated commerce specifications, is chaired by Mastercard and Visa. The presence of CVS, OpenAI, Amazon, and the two largest card networks in the same governance structure is the most credible attempt yet to align the fractured agentic commerce stack on a single set of identity, authorization, and payment primitives.

The fact that Google chose to contribute AP2 instead of keeping it proprietary is the underrated signal. With ACP, UCP, and AP2 now all in play, the standards body is the only place these specs can converge without a winner-take-all protocol war.

Ant International open-sources the Agentic Mobile Protocol

At its MoMents 2026 forum in Kuala Lumpur on April 28, Ant International introduced the Agentic Mobile Protocol (AMP), positioned as the first open-source agentic payment framework built specifically for mobile interfaces, digital wallets, super apps, and wearables. AMP cuts the number of steps to bind a payment agent to a digital wallet by 50% versus traditional card-binding flows, and includes agent-to-agent settlement designed for high-frequency, low-value, and even nano-scale transactions between AI systems.

The distribution side of the announcement is where it gets serious. Ant International is shipping AMP through the Alipay+ network, which spans 40+ digital wallet partners covering roughly 1.8 billion user accounts and 150 million merchants worldwide. The company is also working with Mastercard and Visa on card-based agent transactions and with Google on broader cross-protocol interop.

This is the first major agentic commerce protocol launched outside North America with global merchant scale already attached. If you build for agentic commerce and ignore Asia Pacific, AMP is the spec that just made that decision more expensive.

OKX launches its own Agent Payments Protocol

Around April 28, OKX shipped an Agent Payments Protocol built on its on-chain stack, designed to let AI agents autonomously negotiate and settle transactions across blockchains without traditional card rails or human approval per transaction.

The OKX move pairs with Coinbase's x402 and Stripe's Tempo to round out a third leg of the agentic payments stack: crypto-native exchanges shipping their own protocols rather than waiting for FIDO or the card networks to ratify standards. Expect more of these.

Stripe Sessions 2026 ships 288 products and reframes the keynote around agents

On April 29, Stripe ran its annual Sessions conference in San Francisco and used it to declare that agents are autonomous economic actors responsible for most internet transactions. The headline reveal was a Stripe and Google partnership that lets customers buy directly inside AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app via UCP, with Quince, Fanatics, and JD Sports as the first retail partners.

Stripe also launched Link Wallet for Agents (with the first fully autonomous two-agent payment ever shown live on stage), brought Tempo mainnet online with DoorDash, Kalshi, and Visa as named customers, opened Treasury APIs over MCP, and shipped Stripe Console as an agentic expert that lives inside the dashboard. Shopify joined as the preferred catalog provider for the Agentic Commerce Suite, with Wix and Commercetools added as platforms and Best Buy and Kate Spade live as enterprises.

Full breakdown with timestamped video clips for every announcement: our Stripe Sessions 2026 deep dive.

Visa Agentic Ready goes live in Asia Pacific with 50+ partners

On April 30, Visa launched its Agentic Ready program across Asia Pacific with more than 50 partners enrolled spanning 10 markets: Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. The first phase focuses on issuer readiness, giving banks a structured production-grade environment to test, validate, and understand agent-initiated transactions on Visa rails.

The launch followed Visa's Q1 earnings call on April 28, where management framed agentic commerce as the next major growth engine for the company, citing the move toward small-dollar, software-initiated transactions that traditional card flows were never designed for. Combined with Visa's co-chair seat on the FIDO Payments Working Group earlier in the same week, the network is now visibly building agentic infrastructure on three fronts at once: standards, issuer enablement, and merchant-side discovery.

BigCommerce + PayPal Store Sync wires merchants into Copilot, Meta, and Perplexity

On April 29, Commerce (parent of BigCommerce) integrated PayPal's Store Sync into the BigCommerce App Marketplace and Channel Manager. With one connection, BigCommerce merchants can make their product catalogs, inventory, and order management discoverable across Microsoft Copilot, Meta, Perplexity, and other forthcoming AI surfaces.

PayPal handles payments, fraud detection, identity verification, buyer protection, and dispute resolution behind the scenes, while merchants remain merchant of record and keep their brand identity. The launch was the centerpiece of Commerce Live 2026 in Chicago (April 28 to 30), which also included platform improvements, new B2B tools, payments updates, and additional agentic commerce capabilities for merchants.

The pattern this week is clear. Stripe paired with Shopify on the Agentic Commerce Suite. PayPal paired with BigCommerce on Store Sync. Two ecommerce platforms, two payment networks, two parallel AI-surface distribution stacks.

Amazon Q1 earnings: Rufus MAU up 115%, engagement up 400%

Amazon's Q1 2026 earnings call on April 29 spent significant time on agentic commerce. Rufus monthly active users are up more than 115% year over year, with engagement up nearly 400% over the same period. CEO Andy Jassy made Amazon's ambition explicit: "we want Rufus to be the best shopping assistant anywhere." Rufus now researches products, tracks prices, and automatically buys items in Amazon's store when they hit a target price.

Jassy also previewed the advertising upside. Nearly 20% of shoppers who interact with brand prompts in Rufus continue the conversation, creating multi-turn surfaces for sponsored products that traditional search results cannot match. Amazon's argument against general-purpose agents is that the retailer with the customer's purchase history, viewing data, and shipping configuration has structurally better recommendations than a third-party agent looking at the same catalog from outside.

This reframes the agentic commerce competitive map. The protocol-and-payments camp is selling integration into general-purpose surfaces (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Meta). Amazon is selling first-party data depth as a moat. Both can be true. Both are being aggressively funded.

Wizard partners with Mastercard and Stripe on agent-native payments

On April 30, Wizard, the native AI shopping platform co-founded by Jet.com's Marc Lore, announced a three-way partnership with Mastercard and Stripe. Wizard is integrating Mastercard Agent Pay through Stripe's Shared Payment Tokens, while also using Mastercard Insight Tokens to personalize agent recommendations. The setup gives Wizard a tokenized payments stack purpose-built for autonomous agents transacting inside its conversational shopping experience.

Notable: the trio aligns Mastercard's agent payment rails with Stripe's developer infrastructure rather than putting them in opposition. After a year of card networks and processors all building parallel agentic stacks, the engineering teams are starting to ship interoperability work in production with real merchants attached.

Snap launches AI Sponsored Snaps with Experian as alpha partner

On April 30, Snap unveiled AI Sponsored Snaps, a new ad format that lets advertisers drop their own AI agents directly into the Chat tab. Users can open the conversation, ask questions about products or services, and get recommendations without ever leaving the thread. Brands build and bring their own agents rather than relying on Snap's native My AI assistant.

Experian is the launch alpha partner, using the format to answer questions about saving money, improving credit scores, and exploring loans and credit cards. With 110+ million US monthly active users and 950 billion chats sent globally in Q1 2026, Snap just made conversational ads with embedded brand-controlled agents an actual distribution surface.

This is the agentic version of Sponsored Stories. The format moves brand discovery from a single tap on a static ad to a multi-turn conversation that the brand controls end to end. Expect every major social and chat surface to ship some version of this within twelve months.