AP2 leaves Google for the FIDO Alliance

The handover

On 28 April 2026 Google announced it was donating the Agent Payments Protocol to the FIDO Alliance, arguing that platform-agnostic, community-led ownership would accelerate adoption of secure agentic payments. AP2 v0.2 was released on GitHub alongside the announcement.

AP2 originated in September 2025 as an extension to A2A and MCP, developed with payment partners including PayPal, and was designed to be payment-method agnostic rather than card- or chain-specific.

Verifiable intent is the wallet-relevant part

AP2's core contribution is a handshake for capturing user intent in a form that survives delegation: signed mandates that state what the user authorised, which an agent then presents when it transacts. That is the same problem Cobo solves with Pacts and Coinbase with session caps, expressed as an interoperable artefact rather than a vendor object.

If mandates become the common currency of authorization, wallet differentiation shifts from who can express a limit to who can enforce and revoke one at signing time.

Two standards, not one

The category now has AP2 under FIDO for authorization semantics and x402 under its own foundation for settlement. They are not competitors so much as different halves of a transaction, and every serious agent wallet will end up speaking both.

Sources

Google — “We're donating Agent Payments Protocol to the FIDO Alliance”, 28 April 2026: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-pay/agent-payments-protocol-fido-alliance/

Google Cloud — “Announcing Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)”, 16 September 2025: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/announcing-agents-to-payments-ap2-protocol

PayPal — “Agent Payments Protocol: Building Verifiable Trust for Agentic Commerce”, 16 September 2025: https://developer.paypal.com/community/blog/PayPal-Agent-Payments-Protocol/