MCP and AI basics
Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)
An open standard from Stripe and OpenAI that lets an AI agent complete a purchase with a merchant on a customer's behalf. It is separate from MCP, which gives agents access to tools and data.
ACP is an open standard from Stripe and OpenAI that lets an AI agent complete a purchase with a merchant on a customer's behalf. It covers the exchange between the agent and the merchant at checkout: the items, the buyer's details, payment handled through a delegated token, and confirmation of the order.
ACP and MCP solve different problems. MCP gives an agent access to tools and data in general. ACP defines a specific commerce transaction so that a merchant can accept orders from an agent without exposing its full checkout. A store can support both, and other standards such as UCP and AP2 cover neighbouring parts of the same flow.
Whether ACP matters for you depends on your platform and payment provider, since support is implemented there rather than by the merchant directly. The useful question to ask your platform is which of these protocols it supports today, what it exposes, and how orders that arrive this way are identified in your reporting.