If you came here specifically looking to add UCP support and use Stripe for payments, know that Stripe's protocol and UCP are two separate, independently governed standards. Stripe does not implement UCP directly. This guide covers what Stripe actually offers, ACP, and where it stands relative to UCP so you can decide which one, or both, is relevant to you.
What ACP actually is
The Agentic Commerce Protocol is an open standard, created by Stripe, OpenAI, and Meta, that defines how AI agents interact with businesses to complete purchases on a buyer's behalf. It launched September 29, 2025, alongside Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, and is released under the Apache 2.0 license, meaning any business or AI platform can implement the specification without licensing it from Stripe.
Per Stripe's own documentation, ACP defines four composable building blocks:
- Agentic checkout, creating, updating, and completing checkout sessions
- Cart and feed, browsing product catalogs and managing carts before checkout
- Delegate payment, securely passing payment tokens between buyer, agent, and business
- Delegate authentication, OAuth 2.0-based authorization for agents acting on a buyer's behalf
How it actually works
In ChatGPT's Instant Checkout, a buyer asks for product recommendations, then is shown a Stripe-powered checkout inline in the chat. When they pay, Stripe issues a Shared Payment Token (SPT), scoped to a specific merchant and cart total, so ChatGPT can initiate the payment without ever seeing the buyer's actual card details. ChatGPT passes that token to the merchant through an API, and the merchant remains the merchant of record, able to accept or decline the order, calculate tax, and manage fulfillment and returns themselves.
At launch, this supported single-item purchases from US Etsy sellers, with Shopify merchants (Stripe named Glossier, Vuori, Spanx, and SKIMS as early examples) added afterward. Salesforce announced its own ACP support in October 2025.
What integrating it actually takes
This depends heavily on where you are starting from.
Already processing payments with Stripe
Minimal liftPer Stripe's own blog: "you will be able to enable agentic payments in your existing integration by updating as little as one line of code." This covers accepting Shared Payment Tokens through Stripe's existing PaymentIntents API.
Using a different payment processor
Still possibleStripe's documentation states you can still use Stripe specifically for the agentic payment layer, while continuing to process your regular payments through your existing provider.
Stripe itself has been candid that accepting a payment token is the easy part. Becoming genuinely discoverable and transactable across multiple AI agents, each with its own catalog format and API requirements, is a heavier lift, one Stripe's own blog described as potentially taking "up to six months for every new AI agent you support" if built from scratch. That is the specific gap Stripe's separate Agentic Commerce Suite product, launched in December 2025, is meant to close: a hosted ACP endpoint, product catalog syndication to agents, and a more unified setup, rather than building and maintaining that integration layer yourself.
ACP vs UCP
Both are real, open standards for the same underlying problem, letting AI agents transact with merchants, but they come from different groups and are not interchangeable.
| ACP | UCP | |
|---|---|---|
| Announced | September 29, 2025 | January 11, 2026 |
| Led by | Stripe, OpenAI, and Meta | Google, with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart |
| Primary surface | ChatGPT (Instant Checkout), and adopters like Salesforce | Google AI Mode and other UCP-compatible agents |
| Core mechanism | Shared Payment Tokens via Stripe's PaymentIntents API | A JSON manifest published at /.well-known/ucp |
A merchant is not limited to one. Since both are open, Apache-style standards, a business can implement ACP, UCP, or both, depending on which AI agents its customers actually use. For a deeper look at UCP specifically, see our Universal Commerce Protocol guide.
Checking for UCP specifically?
If your actual goal is UCP compliance rather than ACP, check whether a manifest is present and correctly structured.
Frequently asked questions
Not directly. Stripe co-developed a different open standard, the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), with OpenAI and Meta. UCP is a separate, independently governed standard led by Google. A merchant wanting UCP specifically would need a separate implementation from their Stripe/ACP setup.
According to Stripe's own blog, a merchant already processing payments with Stripe can enable agentic payments in their existing integration by updating as little as one line of code. Stripe has also acknowledged that becoming fully agent-ready, discoverable across multiple AI platforms, is a bigger undertaking, which is what its separate Agentic Commerce Suite product is meant to simplify.
No. Stripe's own documentation states that a merchant using another payment processor can still use Stripe specifically for the agentic payment layer, while continuing to process regular payments elsewhere.
A separate Stripe product launched in December 2025 that provides a hosted ACP endpoint, product catalog syndication to AI agents, and simplified checkout, aimed at businesses that want to be discoverable and transactable across multiple AI agents without building and maintaining that infrastructure themselves.
Sources
- Stripe Documentation, "Agentic Commerce Protocol"
- Stripe, "Developing an open standard for agentic commerce"
- Stripe Newsroom, Instant Checkout announcement
- Stripe, "Introducing the Agentic Commerce Suite"
- OpenAI, "Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol"
- agenticcommerce.dev, the ACP specification