Every other figure published this year as adoption measures a different layer. They are not one series but five: growth in AI-referred traffic to merchant sites, orders a platform attributes to AI channels, sales a vendor counts as AI-influenced, transfers on an on-chain payment protocol, and stores that publish a commerce manifest. None of them counts a payment that software completed on standing authority, and no card network has published that number.
The distinction that governs the reading is whether a person confirmed the payment as it happened or delegated authority in advance — the boundary drawn under delegated payment authority. Most of what went live in the six months to September sits on the assisted side of that line, and the documents that announced it say so.
The dated record: one withdrawal, three standards bodies, one court ruling
Instant Checkout launched on 29 September 2025 for US Etsy sellers, single-item purchases only, with “over a million Shopify merchants … coming soon” in OpenAI’s words. On 24 March 2026 OpenAI wrote that “the initial version of Instant Checkout did not offer the level of flexibility that we aspire to provide” and that merchants would use their own checkout experiences “while we focus our efforts on product discovery”; Target, Sephora, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, Best Buy, The Home Depot and Wayfair had integrated the Agentic Commerce Protocol for discovery, and Walmart’s in-ChatGPT app took payment on Walmart’s own systems. OpenAI gave no count of merchants that went live in between. The counts on record are officer and analyst statements relayed by press: roughly 30 Shopify merchants as of February 2026, per a Forrester analyst citing Shopify (CNBC, 20 March 2026), and about 200,000 Walmart products — an arrangement Walmart’s EVP called “a very temporary moment in time” at a Morgan Stanley conference on 4 March and told WIRED converted at one-third the rate of a click-through to walmart.com (18 March 2026). Both versions left orders, payments and fulfilment with the merchant; what moved was the surface on which a person confirmed.
Google donated the Agent Payments Protocol to the FIDO Alliance on 28 April 2026, releasing v0.2 with “Human Not Present” payments the same day, and the FIDO Alliance opened Agentic Authentication and Payments technical working groups. The x402 Foundation became operational under the Linux Foundation on 14 July with 40 members and Coinbase’s contribution of the protocol completed. EMVCo opened its draft EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications for comment on 1 September, taking intent “managed over time” — recurring purchases, cumulative budgets — as the case to specify.
The perimeter question went to court. On 9 March 2026 the Northern District of California enjoined Perplexity’s Comet agent from Amazon’s password-protected pages on a computer-fraud theory; on 4 August the Ninth Circuit vacated the order, holding that when a user tasks the agent with actions on Amazon.com “it is the user who accessed Amazon’s computers”, and remanded the case. The ruling decides who entered the store; it says nothing about who pays when a purchase is wrong. The FCA published the Mills Review on 6 July with seven recommendations, the fifth being “enable the foundations for agentic finance”, and a survey finding that 20% of 5,000 consumers were likely to use AI acting autonomously within pre-set goals.
Live today, by route
Card rails
Mastercard said in September 2025 that all US cardholders would be enabled for Agent Pay by the holiday season and, in a later 2025 update, that they would be equipped by mid-November; its Q2 2026 review of 30 July describes “live agentic commerce transactions around the world” and gives no count. The one European transaction it documented — Banco Santander, 27 February 2026 — ran “within predefined limits and permissions” and “in a controlled environment”; the release does not say whether the cardholder confirmed the purchase.
Visa’s 2 July 2026 release names 31 issuers, from Barclays and BBVA to Revolut and Klarna, whose cardholders’ agents completed purchases at lastminute.com, Frasers, Cleverbridge and BrickDepot, authenticated with Visa Payment Passkeys to satisfy strong customer authentication. The release also states what the transactions were: each “explicitly authorised by the consumer” and “directly linked to a verified user and their explicit instruction”. Worldline and ING, announcing their transaction the same day, called it a proof of concept and a pilot in which ING “retained control over the authorisation”. On card rails, what is live in Europe is agent execution with the cardholder authorising each payment. Neither network’s releases report a consumer transaction at an independent merchant completed with the cardholder absent.
Acquirer and PSP interfaces
Stripe’s Shared Payment Tokens accept cards, Klarna and Affirm from agents, and its Payment Intents API accepts the Machine Payments Protocol — launched with Tempo on 18 March 2026 — in stablecoins and fiat, both live by 29 April. Link’s agent wallet lets an agent pay “while maintaining control via spending approvals”: the person approves each spend. Amex’s ACE developer kit published three of its five specifications on 14 April — account enablement, intent intelligence, payment credentials — with agent registration and cart context “still under development”. Adyen, Checkout.com, Global Payments and Getnet appear in Mastercard’s 10 June list of Agent Pay for Machines participants, which the release describes as “validating priority use cases” rather than processing.
Merchant perimeter
Merchants in Visa’s European programme admit agents through the Trusted Agent Protocol and an Agent Directory, with Cloudflare and Akamai embedding the check at the edge (Visa, 2 July 2026); the check identifies the agent, and the issuer still authorises the payment against the cardholder’s passkey. After 4 August the injunction Amazon obtained in March no longer stands and the district court case continues on remand, so the admission controls in force at a merchant that does not want user-directed agents are its own. Amazon told Engadget it was “evaluating our next steps”.
Protocol-native payment
x402 is the one route with an independent production count. Chainalysis (3 June 2026) puts cumulative x402 transactions on Base above 100 million through Q1 2026, from near zero in mid-2025, and attributes much of the Q4 2025 surge to PING, a pay-to-mint token that required a one-USDC x402 payment per mint: transactions rose over 10,000% in a single week, weekly wallet retention reached 87% and then fell to 5% when the token farmers left, and growth “moderated” in Q1 2026. The value that remains has shifted upward — transfers of $1 or more were 49% of value in early 2025 and 95% by early 2026. Chainalysis identifies agentic transactions by wallets interacting with the protocol and does not separate service purchases from token mints in its total; totals published by other trackers differ from it by tens of millions depending on which chains and facilitators they count. x402 settles in stablecoins on Base and Solana, outside the rails catalogued under payment systems, which is why its counts and card-network counts cannot be added together.
Discovery surfaces
ChatGPT surfaces products through the Agentic Commerce Protocol and hands checkout to the merchant; Shopify merchants complete purchases “through an in-app browser” (OpenAI, 24 March 2026). Google’s Universal Cart, rolling out across Search and the Gemini app since 19 May, checks out through Google Pay under UCP or transfers the cart to the merchant’s site; the person completes it. Walmart’s in-app assistant, Sparky, reports its growth in users and basket size rather than in purchases it completed, and the shopper is present for each one. In the 15,735-store UCP census, a store’s declared checkout capability is its platform’s template rather than a merchant decision: 99.9% of verified stores declare checkout. Shopify’s 10,409 verified stores declare catalogue, checkout, cart and order at exactly 100%; Wix’s 5,198 declare catalogue and checkout at 100% and cart and order at 0%; no store on either platform deviates from its template on any capability, payment included.
Announced, not deployed, and the next dated checkpoint for each
| Capability | Announced | Still missing | Next dated checkpoint |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amex Agent Purchase Protection | 14 April 2026 | Written as “in the future … will protect”; covers agent error, not fraud; claims only after a return is initiated; excluded where intent is “subjective or non-verifiable”; “full terms and conditions will be made available in the future”; no registered-agent list | Full terms and registered-agent list, marked “coming soon” on the programme page |
| Visa–OpenAI payments in ChatGPT | 10 June 2026 | No launch date, merchant list or checkout description in the release | Visa fiscal Q4 call, late October |
| Visa Agentic Registry, Agent Scoring, Large Transaction Model | 10 June 2026 | Announced capabilities; no deployment figures | Visa fiscal Q4 call, late October |
| Visa commercial and B2B extension | 2 July 2026 | “Being extended”; no B2B transaction documented | Visa fiscal Q4 call, late October |
| Mastercard Agent Pay for Machines | 10 June 2026 | “Will allow”; 32 participants “validating priority use cases” and establishing rules | Mastercard Q3 call, late October |
| Mastercard global Agent Pay rollout | September 2025 | Country firsts in Australia (27 January) and Europe (27 February); no market list | Mastercard Q3 call, late October |
| AP2 in Google products | 19 May 2026 | “In the coming months, starting with Gemini Spark”; the AP2-mandate capability stood at three stores in the June census; the August UCP release renamed it | Gemini Spark launch; monthly census count of the renamed capability |
| Stripe: agent initiation on a customer’s permitted payment method; off-session payments API | 29 April 2026 | Roadmap items at Q2 and Q3 public preview; no general-availability statement located | Q3 2026 preview window; Stripe roadmap page |
UCP v2026-08-25 (payment moved into common, 3DS2, split payments) | 25 August 2026 | Two stores declared it on day two; no platform template had migrated | First Shopify or Wix template on the version; first production storefront declaring a payment token — monthly census |
| EMVCo agentic payments framework | 1 September 2026 | Draft; Know Your Agent and agentic transaction indicators “may” follow | 30 September 2026 comment deadline |
The Amex terms are the only published allocation of loss for an agent that acted inside its authority and got the purchase wrong, and the conditions in the table make the coverage narrow by construction — “best” or “really nice” is excluded from qualifying intent by name. Fraud with a stolen credential stays under existing rules, which Visa’s CEO said on 28 April 2026 continue to protect cardholders while “this is all very early”, and which Mastercard told Payments Dive apply “whether a payment is made by a person or an AI agent”.
Five growth figures quoted as adoption, and the layer each one measures
Each figure below is quoted as evidence of agent adoption. None of the five is published against a disclosed base, and none counts a payment an agent completed.
| Figure | Source, as at | It counts | It cannot show |
|---|---|---|---|
| +62% year on year; +1,219% since October 2024 | Adobe, July 2026 | Referrals from AI sources to US retail sites, as a growth index | The absolute share of visits — Adobe publishes the growth in AI visit share, not the share; a consultancy’s reading of the same data puts it below 1% (Flagship, 31 August 2026) |
| Converts 60% better than non-AI traffic | Adobe, July 2026 | Purchases completed on the merchant’s site after an AI referral | An agent completing payment: the referral means a person finished the checkout |
| Traffic and orders tripled | Shopify, Q2 2026 | Orders attributed to AI channels across Shopify stores | The base; purchases completed in an in-app browser by the buyer |
| Sparky users +70%; +40% per order | Walmart, Q2 FY27 | Use of an in-app assistant | The base; any transaction completed without the shopper |
| 20% of online sales; $262 billion | Salesforce, November–December 2025 | Sales Salesforce attributes to AI and agents “through personalized recommendations and deeper customer engagement” | Payments executed by an agent |
The multiples say nothing about share, and the one absolute reading available is a third party’s. The conversion figures are counted on merchant checkouts reached by a click — the assisted case by definition. Visa’s own summary on 28 July 2026 was that “the timing is tough to predict”; the IMF’s, in April, that “adoption remains at an early stage”.
The counts nobody publishes
No card network publishes a count of transactions authorised with the cardholder absent, and no scheme reports disputes by agent involvement. The card message set carries no agentic transaction indicator; EMVCo listed such an indicator, with Know Your Agent, on 1 September 2026 as something it “may consider” for future publications. Until an indicator exists an acquirer cannot report an agent-initiated share of its volume, and the controls that would act on one — limits aggregated per grant, release, exception handling — catalogued under payment controls have nothing to key on.
Every count quoted in this article also stops before an instruction exists. Referrals, sessions, manifests and declared capabilities are states of discovery and selection; the transaction states from submission to closure described under the payment lifecycle begin after the point where the published measurement ends. The only production series that starts at submission is on-chain, and it counts transfers rather than delegated purchases.
Three checkpoints with no fixed date
- The FCA’s AI good and poor practice publication — “later this year”, per the 6 July release.
- Adobe’s November–December data — the first holiday season measured against a prior one in which AI referrals already converted better than other channels.
- Amazon v. Perplexity on remand — Amazon’s next step after the 4 August ruling.
Source register
Each entry gives the issuing body, document type, date and the proposition it supports.
Company disclosures
- OpenAI — product post, Buy it in ChatGPT: Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol, 29 September 2025 — launch scope (US Etsy sellers, single item), “over a million Shopify merchants … coming soon”, merchant handles orders, payments and fulfilment. openai.com/index/buy-it-in-chatgpt
- OpenAI — product post, Powering Product Discovery in ChatGPT, 24 March 2026 — withdrawal statement; seven retailers integrated ACP for discovery; Shopify in-app browser checkout; Walmart app with Walmart payments. openai.com/index/powering-product-discovery-in-chatgpt
- Visa — press release, Visa and Banks Across Europe Reach the Next Phase of Agentic Commerce, 2 July 2026 — 31 issuers, four merchants, passkeys and SCA, “explicitly authorised by the consumer”, TAP and Agent Directory with Cloudflare and Akamai, B2B extension. visa.co.uk
- Visa — press release, Visa Announces New AI, Stablecoin and Token Innovations, 10 June 2026 — Agent Scoring, Agentic Registry, Large Transaction Model, OpenAI collaboration, no launch date. usa.visa.com
- Visa — fiscal Q3 2026 earnings call, 28 July 2026 — “Agentic commerce is a when, not an if … the timing is tough to predict”. Transcript via Yahoo Finance
- Visa — fiscal Q2 2026 earnings call, 28 April 2026 — “this is all very early”; cardholder fraud protection continues. Transcript via The Globe and Mail
- Mastercard — press release, Mastercard unveils new tools and collaborations to power smarter, safer agentic commerce, 10 September 2025 — all US cardholders to be enabled by the holiday season; global rollout to follow. mastercard.com
- Mastercard — company story, How Mastercard’s agentic tokens are driving agentic AI commerce, 2025 — all US cardholders equipped by mid-November. mastercard.com
- Mastercard — press release, Mastercard launches Agent Pay for Machines, 10 June 2026 — “will allow”; 32 participants validating use cases. mastercard.com
- Mastercard — earnings review, Q2 2026: Growth across commerce, 30 July 2026 — “live agentic commerce transactions around the world”, no count. mastercard.com
- Mastercard — press release, Santander and Mastercard complete Europe’s first live end-to-end payment executed by an AI agent, 27 February 2026 — predefined limits, controlled environment. mastercard.com
- Mastercard — press release, Australia’s first authenticated agentic transactions using Agent Pay, 27 January 2026 — country first. mastercard.com
- Worldline — press release, Worldline, ING and Visa complete a live agentic payment transaction in Europe, 2 July 2026 — proof of concept and pilot; ING retained control over authorisation. globenewswire.com
- American Express — press release, American Express Debuts Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) Developer Kit and Announces Industry-First Protection for Registered Agent Purchases, 14 April 2026. americanexpress.com
- American Express — programme page and terms, Agentic Commerce Experiences, read 5 September 2026 — “in the future … will protect”; eligibility conditions; two specifications under development. americanexpress.com
- Stripe — blog, Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol, 18 March 2026 — MPP launch with Tempo. stripe.com
- Stripe — blog, Everything we announced at Sessions 2026, 29 April 2026 — MPP acceptance, Shared Payment Tokens, Link agent wallet with spending approvals, roadmap previews and quarters. stripe.com
- Google — blog, Google donates Agent Payments Protocol to FIDO Alliance, 28 April 2026 — AP2 v0.2, “Human Not Present” payments, Verifiable Intent. blog.google
- Google — blog, Google Shopping introduces Universal Cart, 19 May 2026 — Universal Cart rollout; AP2 “in the coming months, starting with Gemini Spark”. blog.google
- Google — blog, New Universal Commerce Protocol features and AI tools on Google, 20 May 2026 — Google Pay checkout or transfer to the merchant’s site. blog.google
- Shopify — Q2 2026 earnings call, 5 August 2026 — AI-driven traffic and orders tripled; new-buyer orders at nearly twice the rate; catalogue-fed searches convert at twice scraped data; base undisclosed. Transcript via The Globe and Mail
- Walmart — Q2 FY27 earnings call, 20 August 2026 — Sparky users +70%, +40% per order. Transcript via The Motley Fool
- Salesforce — press release, Salesforce Reveals 2025 Holiday Shopping Data, 5 January 2026 — 20% of online sales and $262 billion attributed to AI and agents. salesforce.com
Standards, protocol and industry bodies
- EMVCo — press release, EMVCo Requests Feedback on Framework for Secure, Interoperable and Scalable Card-Based Agentic Payments, 1 September 2026 — draft EMV Agentic Payments — Framework for Specifications; comments to 30 September; Know Your Agent and Agentic Transaction Indicators as possible future work. Release via Finextra
- Linux Foundation — press release, Operational Launch of x402 Foundation, 14 July 2026 — 40 members; Coinbase’s contribution completed. linuxfoundation.org
- FIDO Alliance — announcement of Agentic Authentication and Payments technical working groups, 28 April 2026, as recorded in Google’s donation post above and in PYMNTS, 28 April 2026.
- Universal Commerce Protocol — release v2026-08-25, 25 August 2026, as summarised in the UCP Checker census below — payment moved into
common; 3DS2; AP2-mandate capability renamed.
Courts, regulators and international bodies
- US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit — opinion, Amazon.com Services, LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 26-1444, 4 August 2026 — preliminary injunction vacated; the user, not Perplexity, accessed Amazon’s computers; remanded. cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov
- US District Court, N.D. California — order granting preliminary injunction, Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 3:25-cv-09514, 9 March 2026. Docket via CourtListener
- Financial Conduct Authority — press release, FCA publishes landmark review into impact of AI on retail financial services, 6 July 2026 — seven recommendations including “enable the foundations for agentic finance”; consumer survey; good and poor practice publication later in 2026. fca.org.uk
- International Monetary Fund — IMF Note 2026/004, How Agentic AI Will Reshape Payments, 22 April 2026 — “adoption remains at an early stage”. imf.org
Independent measurement
- UCP Checker — monthly census, The State of Agentic Commerce — August 2026, 26 August 2026 — 15,735 verified stores; payment token four, none in production; platform template split; spec-version distribution. Crawler re-checks every domain at least every 24 hours; dataset published under CC-BY 4.0. ucpchecker.com
- UCP Checker / UCP Playground — monthly census, The State of Agentic Commerce — June 2026, data as at 13 June 2026 — 2,089 agent sessions, 232 stores, 16 models; 30.3% reached checkout, 2.2% completed; AP2-mandate capability at three stores. ucpchecker.com
- Flagship Advisory Partners — Market Tracker: Agentic Commerce, August 2026, 31 August 2026 — 4 of 80 largest US/EU merchants support agent-led checkout; no new consumer brand since January; AI traffic below 1% of retail visits on Adobe data. flagshipadvisorypartners.com
- Chainalysis — report preview, Agentic Payments Cross the Threshold: Inside x402’s Path to Meaningful Adoption, 3 June 2026 — more than 100 million x402 transactions on Base through Q1 2026; PING; retention; value concentration. chainalysis.com
- Adobe Digital Insights — blog, How AI is reshaping travel planning, 19 August 2026 — July 2026 retail and travel figures. business.adobe.com
- Adobe Digital Insights — Q3 AI Traffic Trends Report, June 2026 — growth in AI visit share (index), conversion and revenue-per-visit comparisons; no absolute share. business.adobe.com (PDF)
Reporting used for context only
- CNBC, 20 March 2026 — Forrester analyst citing Shopify: roughly 30 Shopify merchants on Instant Checkout as of February 2026; Walmart’s ~200,000 products; Walmart EVP’s remarks at Morgan Stanley TMT, 4 March 2026. cnbc.com
- WIRED, 18 March 2026 — Walmart EVP Daniel Danker: in-chat conversion one-third of click-through (as relayed by Retail Dive and eMarketer).
- Payments Dive, 29 April 2026 — Mastercard statement on protections for Agent Pay transactions. paymentsdive.com
- Digital Commerce 360, 12 June 2026 — absence of launch date or merchant list in the Visa–OpenAI announcement. digitalcommerce360.com
- Engadget, 4 August 2026 — Amazon statement after the Ninth Circuit ruling. engadget.com
- Eco (support article), August 2026 — Coinbase-reported and third-party x402 totals differing by tracker scope. eco.com
Next read: Agentic Payments: authority, credentials and initiation — how delegated authority is granted, bounded, credentialed and converted into a payment instruction, and where loss falls when the result is disputed.
