What Is the Personal Agent Protocol? A Guide for Businesses
By Gaowei Chang · Verified against PAP Draft 0.1 on 2026-10-12
What PAP is
PAP stands for Personal Agent Protocol; its public docs use Poppy as a short name. It was designed together by companies including Meta and Sierra; Sierra announced the draft on 9 October 2026. Companies taking part in the design does not mean all of their products have shipped it.
What it covers
PAP covers business discovery, agent sessions, user sign-in, website access, APIs and conversations with a business agent. A business declares its entrance at /.well-known/poppy.json on its own domain and can choose to expose a website, an API or a business agent — not every company has to build a new chatbot. It can list MCP interfaces, while the core conversation format is poppy.
What it doesn’t cover yet
Payments, proactive push notifications when there is no pending request, and attachments are still listed as open topics. Transactions can use a business’s existing interfaces, but “supports PAP” does not automatically mean payments, settlement or omni-channel notifications.
How PAP relates to other protocols
| Project | Main purpose |
|---|---|
| PAP / Poppy | Discovery, sessions, sign-in and interaction between personal agents and businesses |
| MCP | Providing tools, data and external system capabilities to AI applications |
| A2A | Task and message collaboration between agents |
| ANP | Agent discovery, identity and communication across an open network |
| CLI | A command-line interface — not a protocol of the same kind |
These are a division of responsibilities, not interchangeable or auto-convertible layers. Identity, authorization, sessions and error semantics must be adapted one by one.
Protocol support ≠ platform distribution
Four separate milestones: protocol tests pass → end-to-end with a specific client → platform review or discovery available → observable business results. Platforms such as Muse require review and full-flow testing for connectors; approval, placement and traffic are different questions.
How a business can prepare
- Approve the official information agents may use: products, services, policies.
- Pick one first task — a quote, booking or service request.
- Identify the system that handles it and whether it has an API.
- Define what is automatic, what the user confirms and what staff approve.
- Decide what a clear result looks like: request ID, status, receipt.
Sources
- Sierra: Sharing a draft of Personal Agent Protocol (2026-10-09)
- Personal Agent Protocol Specification, Draft 0.1
- PAP: Open topics
- Muse Connector guidelines
- MCP · A2A · ANP
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