Meta and Sierra announced Personal Agent Protocol on October 6, 2026, as an open standard under development for personal AI agents to interact with businesses. Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart were named as industry partners. The proposal aims to give customers control over agent access while letting businesses define what those agents can do.
Meta and Sierra announce Personal Agent Protocol
The proposed standard focuses on a practical gap: a customer’s agent needs a way to interact with a business, and the business needs to recognize and respond to that agent. Personal Agent Protocol is intended to set common rules for those interactions. It is a development effort, not a finished protocol.
Six industry partners join the effort
Alongside Meta and Sierra, the six named industry partners are Genesys, Instinct, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart. Meta and Sierra announced the standard’s development with these companies as industry partners.
How the proposed access model works
Sierra describes a session based on OAuth, a standard for delegated authorization. Some tasks could begin as a guest; account-level tasks would require the customer to sign in. Customers would choose read-only or write access, while businesses would set limits on which actions an agent could take.
The proposed business connections include a company’s existing website, an API or the company’s own agent. Sierra says APIs could use standards such as MCP and OpenAPI. The session is also intended to carry across channels, including actions before and after sign-in.
Where MCP fits
Model Context Protocol (MCP) connects AI agents with tools and data. Sierra lists it as one possible basis for business APIs in the proposed setup. Personal Agent Protocol has a different focus: the interaction between a personal agent and a business. The two can serve different roles in the same system.
Sierra’s planned next steps
In its October 6 announcement, Sierra said it planned to publish a v0.1 specification, hold design workshops and release a reference implementation later in October 2026.
