What are delegated payments in agentic commerce?

Delegating a payment is not handing someone your card, or a direct debit, or paying on a third party's behalf in the accounting sense. In agentic commerce it is something else: an AI agent pays for a person with a permission that expires and has a cap, and the store gets paid without ever seeing the full card. It matters to a store because the order arrives with that permission instead of a customer typing in a card number, and the store needs to know what it can charge with it and who is responsible if something goes wrong.

How it works

The problem it solves is the same in every protocol: the agent has to be able to pay, but it must not be able to spend whatever it wants, wherever it wants, whenever it wants. Today there are two published ways to do it.

In ACP: a single-use credential

OpenAI and Stripe's ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol) has a dedicated piece, the Delegated Payment Spec, which lets OpenAI securely share payment details with the merchant or with its payment service provider.⁠^{[1]OpenAI Developers (API version 2025-09-29). Delegated Payment Spec} The flow goes like this: the buyer picks their payment method in ChatGPT, the details travel directly to the store's payment provider or its credential vault, that provider returns a credential and OpenAI forwards it when the purchase is completed.⁠^{[1]OpenAI Developers (API version 2025-09-29). Delegated Payment Spec}

That credential carries its limits in an object called allowance: the reason (for now only one_time, a single use), the maximum amount, the currency, the checkout session, the merchant and the expiry date. It is single-use and is not valid above that amount or after that date.⁠^{[1]OpenAI Developers (API version 2025-09-29). Delegated Payment Spec} OpenAI is not the seller: each merchant brings its own payment provider, and the first implementation compatible with this specification is Stripe's, with more providers announced.⁠^{[2]OpenAI Developers. Key concepts (Agentic Commerce)}

At Stripe, that credential is a limited grant to use the customer's payment method: the agent grants it to the seller's Stripe profile, with usage and expiry limits, and the agent sets the maximum amount to match the purchase total. The seller only sees limited details of the payment method, such as the card brand and its last four digits, and the agent can revoke the grant. Stripe offers it in the United States, Canada and several European countries.⁠^{[3]Stripe, documentation. Shared payment tokens}

In AP2: a signed permission with conditions

AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol) starts from a different idea: instead of one credential per purchase, the person signs a set of conditions and the agent buys within them. In the flow where the person is not there (Human Not Present), they approve open mandates with their limits on a trusted screen and leave; the agent then builds the order, signs the closed mandates itself with its key, and the credential provider verifies them before handing over the payment credential.⁠^{[4]AP2, official protocol site. Flows} Each of those records is an AP2 mandate.

The conditions of the payment mandate can set an amount range, a total budget, how many times the agent can repeat, who it can pay, with which method and on which dates.⁠^{[5]AP2, official protocol site. Payment Mandate} Version 0.2, published on April 28, 2026, focuses precisely on these purchases made without the person there.⁠^{[6]GitHub, official AP2 repository. Releases · google-agentic-commerce/AP2}

In a store

A made-up example: an office supplies store that takes payments with Stripe receives an order placed from an ACP-compatible assistant. What happens, according to Stripe's documentation:⁠^{[3]Stripe, documentation. Shared payment tokens}

And this is the object the store can look up, as it appears in Stripe's documentation (not a real order):⁠^{[3]Stripe, documentation. Shared payment tokens}

{
  "id": "spt_123",
  "object": "shared_payment.granted_token",
  "deactivated_at": null,
  "usage_limits": {
    "currency": "usd",
    "expires_at": 1793896955,
    "max_amount": 1000
  }
}

The store does not see the card, but it does see the limits: the currency, the maximum amount in the currency's smallest unit and the expiry date.

How to check it

1. Ask your payment provider whether it supports delegated credentials for agents. In ACP, the first compatible implementation is Stripe's.⁠^{[2]OpenAI Developers. Key concepts (Agentic Commerce)}
2. If you take payments with Stripe, check your country on its list and create your Stripe profile, which is who the agent grants the credential to.⁠^{[3]Stripe, documentation. Shared payment tokens}
3. Try the flow in test mode before receiving real orders: Stripe documents how to simulate a credential with its currency, its maximum amount and its expiry.⁠^{[3]Stripe, documentation. Shared payment tokens}
4. Review your refund and chargeback process: it does not change, and it is still yours.⁠^{[1]OpenAI Developers (API version 2025-09-29). Delegated Payment Spec}
5. For AP2, look at the published version in the official repository and ask your gateway whether it verifies its mandates.⁠^{[6]GitHub, official AP2 repository. Releases · google-agentic-commerce/AP2}

Related concept: agentic checkout

Agentic checkout is the entire purchase made by an agent: the cart, shipping, taxes and payment. In ACP, for example, ChatGPT collects the buyer's details, the delivery details and the payment details and calls the store's endpoints, and the store validates the order, calculates the taxes and processes the charge in its own systems.⁠^{[2]OpenAI Developers. Key concepts (Agentic Commerce)} Delegated payment is only the last piece: the one that lets you get paid without the agent holding the card. A store can prepare its checkout for agents and decide separately which provider and what limits it accepts delegated payments with.

To go further, the AP2 mandate goes down to the detail of the signed conditions and the agentic commerce reading path orders the rest of the vocabulary.