Sierra + Meta Publish the Draft "Personal Agent Protocol" (Poppy) — 43 Design Partners Including OpenAI, but Not Anthropic
New subject (announced Tuesday, October 6; draft published Friday, October 9, 2026). Sierra (Bret Taylor's customer-service AI company) and Meta launched the Personal Agent Protocol — "Poppy" — an open standard for how personal AI agents identify themselves, get customer permission, and transact with businesses12. The draft is live at personalagentprotocol.org.
The partner list is the story. Poppy was announced October 6 with Meta, Genesys, Instinct, NiCE, Rocket, Shopify, Stripe and Walmart (The Verge; CNBC reported OpenAI and Anthropic were "not on board for now"). On October 9, Sierra added 35 more design partners: Adyen, Bank of America, BBVA, Chime, Cigna, Cloudflare, Comcast, DIRECTV, ElevenLabs, FOX, Gap, GEICO, Hertz, Mastercard, Nordstrom, Notion, Okta, OpenAI, PayPal, Plaid, SiriusXM, Synchrony, Target, United Airlines, Venmo, Visa, Wells Fargo, Zapier, Zendesk, 1Password and more (Sierra blog). Anthropic is still absent while OpenAI joined — a notable split at the protocol layer.
How it works. Per Sierra: companies publish one discovery file at a standard address (/.well-known/poppy.json); agents start identified sessions3; sign-in goes through OAuth ("If permitted by the company, the agent can sign in on the customer's behalf with a session token that grants only the access the customer approved"); one token works across the company's APIs, website and its own agent. The stack is deliberately boring — OAuth, JWTs, HTTPS, OpenAPI and MCP — and Sierra positions Poppy as complementary to shopping-focused protocols like Universal Commerce Protocol: Poppy covers "how a personal agent identifies itself, gets the customer's permission, and works with a company across any kind of task — from buying a sweater to applying for a mortgage."
The demo that shows the bet. At Sierra Summit, Rocket's VP of Product ran a live mortgage pre-approval through Meta's Muse agent (Meta Launches Muse Consumer Agent on Muse Spark 1.3 — Subscription Economics and a Trust Test): Muse found Rocket's agent via Poppy, asked permission, the customer signed in once, "and within moments, Alex had a pre-approval letter ready. While he was in control at every step of the way, the agents did all the work."
Why it matters: agent commerce currently means agents impersonating users on human-built web pages — exactly the ambiguity behind this fall's agent incidents. Poppy is the infrastructure answer: agents identify themselves, companies set parameters, customers grant scope. With OpenAI, the card networks, banks and retailers at the table, the standards race for agentic commerce has a frontrunner — and design workshops plus a reference implementation are promised "over the next month."
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An instance of AI security now treats the model itself as the insider threat. — Poppy gives agents an identity and scoped-permission layer so they stop impersonating users on human-built web pages. ↩︎
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An instance of Proprietary agent runtime security must yield to open-source, multi-vendor standards. — Agent identity and permissioning is being settled by an open, multi-vendor OAuth-based protocol with 43 partners rather than any platform's proprietary runtime. ↩︎
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An instance of Agents must now identify themselves before they can transact. — The leading agent-commerce standard makes self-identification and scoped customer permission the entry condition for any agent doing business with a company. ↩︎