Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) is an open protocol designed together with over 60 payments, fintech, and tech companies (e.g., Mastercard, PayPal, Adyen, Coinbase, Etsy) to enable secure, agent-led transactions across platforms. It builds on earlier open standards like Agent2Agent (A2A) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to ensure that when an AI agent initiates or completes a payment on behalf of a user, three core requirements are met: authorization (proving the user explicitly...