Meta and Sierra Publish Personal Agent Protocol Draft Poppy

Meta and Sierra published the first draft of the Personal Agent Protocol on October 9, 2026, turning their October 6 announcement at Sierra Summit into working technical language and adding 35 new design partners — OpenAI among them — to the effort. The draft, nicknamed "Poppy," sets out an open standard for how a person's AI agent finds a business, signs in, and gets a task done there, giving companies a way to recognize an agent acting for a real customer instead of blocking it as a suspected bot.

According to Sierra's announcement, the Personal Agent Protocol was developed with industry partners including Genesys, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe, and Walmart, with Meta co-developing. The protocol defines how personal AI agents interact with businesses, handling authentication, consumer consent, and company visibility through websites, APIs, and company-designed agents. As reported by the Digital Watch Observatory, the initiative is intended to enable companies to work with personal agents in the manner that best serves their customers — either through existing websites and APIs or through an agent of the company's own design — while following existing standards such as OAuth.

What the Personal Agent Protocol draft defines

The draft published at personalagentprotocol.org lays out five building blocks. First, discovery: a company publishes a single machine-readable file at the standard path /.well-known/poppy.json, describing how agents can interact with it, how customers sign in, and what an agent may do. Second, sessions: the agent opens a session for its customer, starting as a guest — enough to check availability or a returns policy — and always identifies itself. Third, sign-in: the customer signs in on the company's own page through OAuth, after which the agent can act with a token limited to what the customer approved. Fourth, one session across channels: the same token works across the company's APIs, website, and agent, so a question asked before sign-in and an order changed after it count as one visit. Fifth, getting the job done: the company chooses whether the agent works through its website, through its APIs built on standards such as MCP and OpenAPI, or through an agent the company runs itself.

Privacy is built into the flow. Until the customer signs in, the draft says, a company knows the visitor only by an ID that carries no personal information — and that ID is different at every company. According to the draft analysis published by CellCog, the customer remains in control throughout the Personal Agent Protocol flow, deciding whether the agent receives read-only or write access, while the company sets the parameters for what agents can do.

Who signed on to the Personal Agent Protocol — and who stayed out

Sierra's October 9 post named 35 design partners that will participate in the design process, according to reporting compiled from Sierra's announcements and executive interviews: Adyen, Bank of America, BBVA, Cloudflare, Comcast, DIRECTV, ElevenLabs, FOX, Gap Inc., GEICO, Hertz, Klaviyo, Mastercard, Nordstrom, Notion, Okta, OpenAI, PayPal, Plaid, SiriusXM, Target, United Airlines, Venmo, Visa, Wells Fargo, Zapier, Zendesk, and 1Password, among others. Payments and banking form the largest contingent, followed by retail, insurance, airlines, and software.

The addition of OpenAI marks a notable shift. On October 6, CNBC reported that OpenAI and Anthropic were not on board; three days later, OpenAI appeared on Sierra's design-partner list. The commitment covers participation in the design process, not a promise to ship support, and Anthropic remains absent. The development is awkward in one respect: Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor also chairs OpenAI's board, which sharpens the spotlight on what OpenAI does next. Partner executives made their case in the announcement — Genesys chairman and CEO Tony Bates described personal AI as creating a new front door to the enterprise and called the protocol an important step toward the shared foundation the era will require, while Stripe's head of payments Kevin Miller said customers who send an agent expect the same service they would receive themselves and argued that businesses need a standard way to recognize those agents.

Why the standards race matters now

The Personal Agent Protocol lands at a moment of genuine friction. Meta's personal agent Muse launched in September and, according to Meta's David Singleton, already has millions of users in the United States. But Amazon blocked Meta's agents on September 20 for failing to identify themselves while browsing, and TechCrunch has documented blocking across sites including Delta, United, Zillow, Yelp, and eBay — distinguishing deliberate policy blocks from accidental ones caused by Cloudflare's September anti-crawler update. Taylor told CNBC the situation is chaos without a shared standard, and Singleton framed the protocol as shared plumbing comparable to email.

The Personal Agent Protocol is also not alone in the race. Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol, launched in June, already lets agents buy from about 175 million merchants, and Stripe and Shopify sit in both camps. Several features the Personal Agent Protocol's supporters want — finer-grained permissions on specific actions, push notifications so a company can alert an agent when a flight is delayed or an order ships, and a payments extension that would let an agent complete a purchase without sharing card details — are listed in Sierra's post as ideas, not commitments. Sierra says it will host design workshops and publish a reference implementation over the coming month, and the companies plan to release the v0.1 specification later in October.

For the agent economy, the draft signals where competition over agent infrastructure is headed. Whether Anthropic, Google, and Amazon eventually sign on — and whether the two rival lists of partners converge — will decide if Poppy becomes the shared front door its backers promise or one standard among several. The markers to watch over the next month are the reference implementation and the first design workshops for the Personal Agent Protocol, which will show whether businesses move from endorsing the idea to publishing the required discovery file on their own domains.