Meta and the business AI startup Sierra are building an open standard, a shared set of rules anyone may use, for how personal AI agents deal with companies. An AI agent is AI that can carry out tasks on its own, such as using apps and websites, instead of only answering questions; Sierra says people already use them to schedule appointments, book flights and shop for car insurance. Sierra announced the effort, called Personal Agent Protocol, this week, with Genesys, Instinct, Shopify, Stripe, Walmart and the home-buying company Rocket as partners.
Today the process is clumsy. Sierra says most personal agents use websites the way people do, loading pages and clicking through forms, and sometimes fall back on calling a support line, which can be slow and can fail. Meta's own agent, Muse, went to the top of Apple's App Store after it arrived in early September, according to a news report. Some businesses block such agents: Amazon is among the companies that have blocked Meta's agents, citing worries that they copy content from its website, the report says. Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor, who also chairs OpenAI and leads the effort, said in an interview that "it is kind of chaos until such a standard exists."
Under the plan, a person decides how much access their agent gets, and each business sets what agents may do with it. An agent can arrive as a guest, which may be enough to check whether something is in stock or ask about returns. For anything inside your account, you sign in on the company's page or use a login already set up with your agent, and you choose whether the agent may only look or may also make changes. It uses an established technology for granting access, and Taylor, in an interview, compared it to logging in to other websites with a Google or Facebook account.
From there, the agent works through whichever routes the company chooses to offer: its regular web pages, a direct software connection that skips the pages, or the company's own AI agent for jobs that need back-and-forth, such as a warranty claim. Sierra says a task that can take an agent a long time on web pages could be done in seconds over a direct connection. Later additions could let a company tell your agent the moment a flight is delayed or an order ships, and let an agent pay for something without handing over card details.
Very little exists yet. Sierra plans to publish the first draft of the rules later this month, along with workshops and sample code for developers. OpenAI and Anthropic have not signed on, though Taylor said in an interview that he expects them to join. It is not yet known whether Amazon and other companies that block agents will adopt the rules, or how well the rules will stop agents that misbehave.