Meta, Walmart, Stripe and several other companies are publishing what they call a personal agent protocol, an open standard meant to govern how AI agents interact with businesses, CNBC reported. The effort arrives about a month after Meta launched Muse, a personal agent that quickly became a viral hit.
Also in the group is Sierra, an enterprise AI startup that Bret Taylor started after serving as Salesforce co-CEO. Taylor, who also chairs OpenAI, is leading the initiative. He told CNBC that companies still have a lot of work ahead to decide when and how personal agents may reach their information. Businesses will be able to tell whether they are dealing with an agent or a real person, he said, which matters because they do not want a random bot with no person behind it getting access to a service. Without a standard, he said, it is chaos.
Taylor likened the idea to signing in to other websites with Google or Facebook credentials, a technology he worked on as Facebook's chief technology officer. The standard should help with authentication and give companies visibility into what agents actually do on their sites.
David Singleton, a vice president at Meta Superintelligence Labs and a former Stripe technology chief, stressed security. For agents to work well, customers have to share payment cards and personal details, and the standard is meant to add some visibility and control. He compared it to email, which works because everyone uses the same standard. According to Singleton, millions of people in the United States already use Muse and growth is rapid, with people turning to it to sign children up for classes, find gifts and book appointments.
Muse reached the top of Apple's App Store after launching in early September and remains there, ahead of ChatGPT. Not every company welcomes such agents, though. Amazon is among those that have blocked Meta's agents, citing concerns about scraping. It also blocked the agent from Perplexity and sued that startup in November, alleging it hid its agents so it could keep scraping Amazon's site without permission. Perplexity called the lawsuit a bully tactic.
OpenAI and Anthropic have not joined the group so far. Taylor said he expects the AI leaders to take part eventually and that he would be really disappointed if competitors did not use the standard.