A Formal Analysis of Agent Payment Protocols
Agent payment protocols are emerging as a key transaction layer for autonomous commerce, enabling AI agents to purchase goods and services and execute payments on users' behalf. Unlike conventional payment flows, they distribute user intent, delegated authority, credential use, settlement, and fulfillment across multiple actors and stages, creating security dependencies that no single message or participant can enforce. Yet these guarantees remain largely implicit across evolving specifications, schemas, and reference implementations, with little systematic formal analysis. We formalize four representative agent payment protocols: x402, MPP, ACP, and AP2 in Tamarin. Using a common abstrac...
| Authors | Ke Jiang, Mohan Yu, Yuan Chang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 30 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
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