# Verifiable Intent (VI) vs Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)

The map lists them as complementary: sites and agents commonly implement both. They answer different questions: Verifiable Intent is a step 9 (Account) standard, Agentic Commerce Protocol step 7 (Pay), so they are not substitutes.

[9 Account](/category/account/) [Verifiable Intent](/protocols/vi/) · [7 Pay](/category/pay/) [Agentic Commerce Protocol](/protocols/agentic-commerce-protocol/)

|  | [Verifiable Intent](/protocols/vi/) VI | [Agentic Commerce Protocol](/protocols/agentic-commerce-protocol/) ACP |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Lifecycle step | 9 Account: Prove what happened; be judged | 7 Pay: Settle the bill |
| Answers | After an agent completes a purchase on a user's behalf, can the merchant, issuer and consumer all point to the same cryptographic record of what the user actually authorized? | How do a buyer's agent and a merchant complete a deterministic, programmatic checkout without the agent becoming the merchant of record? |
| Governed by | Mastercard; contributed to the FIDO Alliance Payments TWG (2026-04-28); built on FIDO Alliance, EMVCo, IETF and W3C primitives | Technical Steering Committee (up to 7 org seats); OpenAI, Stripe, and Meta are lead maintainers, with OpenAI and Stripe as Founding Maintainers holding last-resort veto over mission, neutrality, security, and fork-integrity decisions |
| Status (issuer's words) | Draft (v0.1); open-sourced specification and reference implementation | Beta open standard, interaction model for connecting buyers, agents, and businesses |
| Version | 0.1-draft (2026-02-18) | 2026-04-17 (date-versioned spec; unreleased/ tracks current development) (2026-04-17) |
| Form / transport | document format | endpoint |
| Found at | none | Bilateral capability negotiation (per RFC: capability_negotiation) between agent platform and merchant; no fixed well-known path published |
| Implementation | prototype | multi-implementation — OpenAI and Stripe (project README) |
| Evidence | 4 verified | 3 verified, 2 reported |
| Primary use case | Let agents buy on behalf of a person | Let agents buy on behalf of a person |
| Last verified | 2026-10-23 (current) | 2026-10-23 (current) |
| Specification | [https://verifiableintent.dev/spec/](https://verifiableintent.dev/spec/) | [https://github.com/agentic-commerce-protocol/agentic-commerce-protocol](https://github.com/agentic-commerce-protocol/agentic-commerce-protocol) |

## When to use which

- Choose Verifiable Intent when your question is “After an agent completes a purchase on a user's behalf, can the merchant, issuer and consumer all point to the same cryptographic record of what the user actually authorized?” and you accept its maturity: status "Draft (v0.1); open-sourced specification and reference implementation", implementation prototype.
- Choose Agentic Commerce Protocol when your question is “How do a buyer's agent and a merchant complete a deterministic, programmatic checkout without the agent becoming the merchant of record?” and you accept its maturity: status "Beta open standard, interaction model for connecting buyers, agents, and businesses", implementation multi-implementation (OpenAI and Stripe (project README)).

Guidance is derived from the two records (question, status, implementation, prerequisites, pairings), not from opinion. Each record's page carries its numbered references.

## Read the full articles

- [Verifiable Intent](/protocols/vi/): After an agent completes a purchase on a user's behalf, can the merchant, issuer and consumer all point to the same cryptographic record of what the user actually authorized?
- [Agentic Commerce Protocol](/protocols/agentic-commerce-protocol/): How do a buyer's agent and a merchant complete a deterministic, programmatic checkout without the agent becoming the merchant of record?

Ask the MCP server to compare any two: the compare-protocols prompt, or get on both ids. [Connect](/connect/).

[vi.json](/data/protocols/vi.json) · [agentic-commerce-protocol.json](/data/protocols/agentic-commerce-protocol.json) · [Markdown](/compare/vi-vs-agentic-commerce-protocol/index.md)