Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe joined the Universal Commerce Protocol Tech Council, an industry body developing an open standard that governs how AI agents handle the full shopping journey across any platform and payment processor. The five companies join founding members Google, Shopify, Etsy, Target, and Wayfair in helping to shape the future of the protocol.
Amazon's membership has stirred conversation this past week, with folks wondering if the company's participation in the council indicates that opening its platform to third-party AI shopping agents could be on the horizon, which would be a shift from its current stance of actively blocking external bots and even suing AI companies that attempt to scrape its product listings.
Will OpenAI be joining the council anytime soon?
Honestly, if these new members don't mark the nail in the coffin for OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, I don't know what will. I think it'd actually be a baller move if OpenAI abandoned ACP and supported UCP, as it'd demonstrate the lab's commitment to open and interoperable standards, as opposed to a desire to write the entire playbook itself.
However, I also feel that Google should spin UCP off into its own independent foundation like the W3C or the Linux Foundation, rather than keeping UCP under its umbrella. This would show Google's commitment to building open standards, and not make competitors feel like they're bending the knee to Google's dominance.